Since the age of ten years old, I have been a member of the Delphi Community through Internet.  Now, not many people are aware of what this actually is, but I know hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t be without it.

The Delphi Community is the term used to describe the Delphi programmers that get together through newsgroups, forums, egroups, projects and web sites over the Internet or sometimes at conferences to discuss Delphi.

Delphi is a programming language that uses Object Pascal in a more modernised Integrated Development Environment for the Windows operating systems, rather than the former use of DOS and Turbo Pascal.

Through these people and our common love for Delphi and computers, I have learnt a great deal about people’s behaviour, many different and diverse cultures, and gotten a taste of on-line business and successes.

My father and I began a web site, several years ago now, that we called the Delphi Programming Source Code web site. Although we had some helpful content available to Delphi users, that wasn’t getting us as many visitors as we wanted, so we began interviewing important members of the Delphi community.  I helped my father to compose the questions, and after the person had been interviewed I would help with the formatting and editing.  The editing was often very difficult because our subjects almost always spoke foreign languages, such as Italian, Russian, or Dutch.  Sometimes it would be necessary to reconstruct entire sentences to help them to get the message across.    

Those people that we interviewed included such people as Marco Cantu, Bob Swart, Maxim Peresada, Charlie Calvert…some of these men had internationally selling books, some worked with or for Borland, all of them are looked upon with respect. It taught me that although they could not speak fluent english, they were still popular icons and gurus because we shared Delphi and it was something we could all communicate in and understand from each other.

Greg Lief was a firm favourite of ours for a long time.  He was offering Delphi courses over the Internet, and we brought his Creating Components Courseware from him.

It was very helpful and good content, so we emailed him and asked him if we could have the first few pages of it for publication on our site.  He replied, offering us the introduction and first chapter.  Over the years, he has given free copies of his components to our customers and ourselves, given us all his courses and numerous tips and articles for our web site.  In return, we have interviewed him, reviewed his products, and given him hundreds of dollars of advertising and sales of his components.  Mixed in with all this business, we have complemented him on his personal writings, especially about his son Jay, and become friends.

I was given a feeling of importance in our community, a feeling of importance that a teenage girl cannot get in a normal town.

The source code examples I was putting on ours and others web sites where helping other people, and so I would receive emails of people complementing and thanking me.

I helped a gentleman in America who had designed some of the software used on NASA space rockets to begin his Delphi for Fun kids web site.  My sister and I later went on to win $25USD each in his logo designing competition.  It wasn’t much, but it was my first taste at earning American money for myself.

An advertisement I wrote convinced the principal of the British School in Brazil to purchase our products.  It turned out he had an OBE and was a very successful man.

It is often that my father will receive an email from a person thanking him for his site or egroups.  I am proud of this, not only because my father is so popular, but also because in a way, they are also thanking me.

My father is the moderator of the Delphi Programming list.  This gets thousands of messages monthly from people asking how do do such-and-such a procedure using Delphi.  It is incredible to see the wonderful way people help each other on this list.  A person will write in with a question, and will receive multiple answers, each replier selflessly giving their time and efforts for another person and asking nothing in return.  Theo, from Greece, is an especially good example of this, sending tips, entire units, for the person he is helping.  And the beauty of this is that they do not even seem to realise the trully wonderful people that they are.  These men and women are making a difference and an impact on other peoples lives, and making a hard road smooth for them, yet they ask no thanks – and that is true kindness and friendliness.

Of course, there is the occasional argument, and these are always highly amusing.  The members of the list are intelligent, and so their arguments, such as a recent one about implementing a variable, are well constructed and could be put in to a university or political debate.

It was a rare occasion when we had any trouble with the Delphi Community.  I remember distinctly a South African young man who had a tips page on our web site. In return, we got him alot of publicity and gave him free advertising worth alot of money. We dealt with him for over a year, and passed on a deal to him where he would receive a free copy of the Ziegler component suite if he wrote a review of them.  He took the components and never wrote the review, so I ended up having to do it.  We never dealt with him again and he disappeared from the Delphi community.

There were times when we would find our works or ideas on another persons web site, with them taking the credit for it.  If this got out of hand, it would mean less hits to our site if people could get the content elseware.  We could not do anything about this other than ask the person to take it off their pages, which they generally wouldn’t do, since there is no Internet policing.  Although it upset us greatly, especially the injustice of it, it also gave me a sense of pleasure knowing that people liked our work to the extent of stealing it and saying that they had done it themselves, so it was work that they would have been proud to have done.

The Delphi Community is a brilliant and warming thing.  If ever you get this downhearted feeling, they are always there to show you human kindness and appreciation.  Since I began going to a public school this year, I have seen less and less of these people, and it upsets me greatly to remember all the great times I had.  During my spare time though, I try to catch up on whats going on.  Yes, dad tells me, Dr Bob is still cheating on the Top 100.  Yes, Jim Burns is still on the list.  No, CoolDev.com is not using their old banner and have a new one, and did you know that Howard has stopped his mailing list?

It is fun to sit next to dad and read through the messages, check the web sites, and see how things have changed.  But one thing is never missing – the old comradeship, competitiveness and friendliness that they radiate.

It is something that I love, and although I may be busy sometimes with assignments and school work and I may gradually begin grow away from it, it is a vital part of me – and I will never really leave it.