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.

I like to keep all my computers upgraded with the latest versions of their respective operating systems. This goes for Mac and Android devices as well as all machines running Windows--even my virtual machines get the most recent upgrades whenever I use them. My development systems all use Windows but only one has been upgraded to Windows 11--the rest are still on Windows 10.

Nearly two years ago, Idera acquired apilayer, a collection of various cloud-based APIs. Idera being Embarcadero's parent company (and Embarcadero being the publisher of my favorite development tool, Delphi), I was interested to see what this was all about and looked at the handful of APIs available. One caught my eye and I made a note to come back and check it out more when the time was right.