The author of Code Faster in Delphi has just released his second book, Code Better in Delphi--and it is just as packed with useful coding techniques that will improve the way you write software as the first. The book is an easy read with short, clear examples that illustrate the concepts presented.

There have been several iterations of the Delphi IDE's Welcome Page, or the first page that you see by default when you start Delphi without a project. This space has been used for keeping a list of favorite projects for convenient loading, marketing of related products by Embarcadero, and quick links to tutorials and resources. Delphi 11 introduced, in my opinion, the best interface yet as it's completely customizable by the user and provides an API for writing your own plug-ins to provide additional functionality.

Over the last few months, I've been studying and working on getting a website up with Hugo, a static site builder based on Markdown files. It doesn't take months to learn Hugo--it's pretty straight-forward and there's a great YouTube video course that gets you up to speed quickly.

Admittedly, text editors isn't a terribly important topic to blog about but since I wrote a public comparison of UltraEdit vs EditPad just over a year ago and since my preferences and stance on these have changed, I thought I should explain my new perspective. My license for the UltraEdit package was the All-Access Subscription, which means I had a full license to use all of the products in the suite for a year after which I would need to renew the license in order to keep using them.

Early in my career, I was studying the code of an application written for the Apple II in preparation for developing something similar on the PC and would often ask questions of the original programmer. Most of the time, I'd get valuable information about the purpose of a routine or why something was done a particular way. But every once in a while, when pressed for an explanation, the programmer would think for a minute, then simply utter, "For Historical Purposes" and walk away chuckling.

This time of year in the United States is marked by a major holiday, Thanksgiving, the last Thursday of November. It is during this time that ad campaigns, religious organizations, and families everywhere tend to step up their recognition of everything they're thankful for. As a software developer, I'd like to hook into this theme and highlight features of programming tools I use that make my life better--most notably, Delphi--and create my own "thankfulness" list.