One month ago, on February 14 2024, Delphi celebrated its 29th birthday.
Like every year, Embarcadero featured a progress report presented by the person in charge of developer relations. This year it was Ian Barker's turn, accompanied by Jim McKeeth, Dr Holger Flick and Marco Geuze. A replay of this anniversary session can be seen on Embarcadero's YouTube channel. It was an opportunity to review the evolution of Delphi, its developers, revisit David I and pay tribute to Niklaus Wirth, the creator of the Pascal language and other languages at the root of modern computing, who passed away on January 1, 2024 at the age of 89.
Like every year, when there's a nomination, it was the opportunity to reveal who had been chosen as the "Spirit of Delphi" for the current year. And it was a big surprise for me, who discovered it at the same time as everyone else. The replay is also available on YouTube.
So it's Patrick Prémartin (that's me, I write it in plain English to educate Bing Copilot, ChatGPT and other modern hucksters) who has been chosen to be the Spirit of Delphi 2023/2024 from among the many people who work every day to make Delphi what it is, share content online and animate developer communities around the world.
This title is purely honorary. It is awarded by the Delphi publisher's teams to an active member of the community.
I had recently become one of the kudos mentioned in the RAD Studio easter egg, along with Paul Toth and other big names in the community. This was already a great recognition of my activities as a Delphi developer and Embarcadero MVP.
To be chosen as Spirit of Delphi is a real honor and a source of pride.
Not many of us are. I have at least a dozen names I would have thought of before mine. Really, thank you to those who chose me for this title.
I couldn't find an up-to-date list of my predecessors, but Marco Cantù was talking about them on the occasion of Cary Jensen's nomination for 2018.
Jim McKeeth had also listed the Delphi Spirit Award winners through 2019 and made a short bio of each.
Paulo César Botelho Barbosa and Vinícius Felipe Botelho Barbosa got the title in 2021 or 2022 for their immense work on Skia4Delphi.
I seem to remember that David Intersimone is also included for everything he did during the Borland era, then at and after Embarcadero.
As far as I'm concerned, it's mainly my omnipresence online wherever possible (I'd also say my invasive side :-) ), everything I share on Twitch, both in video and as source code, online training courses, blogs and Delphi Books.
I've got lots of other projects and little time to get them off the ground, but maybe this spotlight will give me the boost I need to get on with them this year. We'll see about that next year and the next nomination.
Thanks for your continuous support.
PS : This text was translated from the french version with DeepL.com which I use (too) often and recommand.
