Conference season has (for me) departed

It’s been a busy 6 weeks for me in terms of conferences. I used to be a regular speaker on Delphi and C++Builder topics at international conferences in the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s, but haven’t really been doing much in that area in the last semi-decade for various reasons that have no mileage in verbalising. However this autumn/fall I’ve thrown myself back into it as much as was feasible.

Firstly there was the Delphi version of the free, online CodeRage 7 conference where I resurrected a talk that was reasonably popular when I did it towards the start of the century. The IDE Productivity Tips & Techniques session is really a run-through of my favourite IDE shortcuts, mostly keyboard shortcuts, updated for the current product version. This session pretty much works for Delphi or C++Builder as the two products run within the same IDE, so any given shortcut usually applies to both with a few limited exceptions. Most of the code seen in the editor of this session was Delphi. You can see the replay of this session by checking it out on YouTube at this link (or below) or by downloading the MP4 video of the session at this link. A summary write-up of these shortcuts can be seen in one of my earlier blog posts: Delphi IDE productivity keystrokes.

Next on the agenda was Be-Delphi 2.0 in Antwerp, Belgium where I got to show off the early beta of RemObjects’ Project ‘Nougat’, a Delphi-like Object Pascal development tool that generates native 64-bit Mac OS X apps and native iOS apps that make use of Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch libraries. Official photos of the event are on the main site, but also one of the speakers, Stefaan Lesage took a number of pictures.

Then to Arnhem in The Netherlands for a couple of sessions at SDN’s SDE+ event: The IDE productivity tips session at the start of the day and a run-through of Project ‘Nougat’. These sessions went very nicely for me, despite one or two technical scares on the way through. It was also pleasing to see a good fall of snow come down during the day. Photos of the event are available here. I spotted a couple of shots of myself in the album:

Finally we had the C++ version of CodeRage 7 earlier this week. Because my IDE Productivity Tips talk is essentially language-agnostic it was run again in this conference. There are a couple of things in the talk that aren’t applicable to a C++Builder user, but the majority of the keystrokes and tips passed along are perfectly applicable, even if most of it was delivered using non-C++ code sitting in the editor.

As I mentioned above, it’s been a while since I’ve been a regular on the conference circuit, but I really enjoyed delivering these sessions and watching a good bunch of other speakers delivering good content. It’s great to be back :-)