Mentors and inspiration

Recently I've had the pleasure of reconnecting with a past colleague. Chuck Jazdzewski was the man instrumental in my coming to Borland to join the Turbo Pascal team. I count him as one of my professional mentors. While I also worked closely with Anders Hejlsberg, it was with Chuck that I worked with on a more day-to-day basis.

Back in the early '00s, Chuck left Borland and moved to Redmond to work at Microsoft. A couple of years ago, I received an email on my private account from a manager at Google requesting a reference for Chuck. Chuck had left Microsoft, moved back to the Bay Area and joined Google. A few weeks ago we had lunch up in Mountain View. It was good to reconnect and catch up.

Recently he spent some time and wrote some very in-depth and interesting accounts describing the early development of Delphi. He included some of the reasoning and philosophy behind many of the Delphi features that are largely taken for granted and have been copied by other tools and frameworks over the years.

I strongly encourage you to read the posts starting from July of this year (2015). Even if you're not a Delphi user, the information is valuable.