I was reading the thread "Next Spirit of Delphi" in the Delphi non-technical newsgroup today, and I felt it worth posting about. This is a prize Borland has given out for many years now to people of the Delphi community who contribute time and effort to support the product or extend it. Component vendors are not included, as it is meant to be (at least partially) free work.

History

I won this award, together with Bob Swart in 1999. I got a Delphi Enterprise box signed by all of the members of the R&D Team. It is sitting there on my main shelf, in the office. We were also interviewed for BDN.

Googling around the web, I tried rebuilding a list of winners, as I could not find the page on Borland site any longer. It listed all the winners and the prize spirit, hosting also online voting for a few years, but it has long gone:

  • 1998: Robert M. Czerwinski (The Delphi Super Page) and Fedor Koshevnikov, Serge Korolev and Igor Pavluk (RX Library) - see David I announcement and note that the one for RX was highly debated
  • 1999: Marco Cantù and Bob Swart
  • 2000: Maxim Peresada (Torry's Delphi Pages)
  • 2001: Project JEDI (a collective award)
  • 2002: Mark Miller (of CodeRush fame)
  • 2003: Ray Konopka (as Bob Swart reminded me)
  • 2004: Nick Hodges

2005 Nominations

For this year I strongly support the proposal of John Herbster in the newsgroup thread to give the prize to two distinguished and passionate developers, whose excellent contributions are going to be incorporated directly into Delphi itself:

  • Pierre le Riche for his FastMM memory manager
  • Dennis Kjaer Christensen for his FastCode work