A curious phenomenon has emerged in the Singapore market recently. It appears that there is a need for Delphi developers in at least 6 to 10 companies.

As the technical manager for my company, I found it rather amusing. My company was registered in Oct 2001. Unfortunately, the company was named wrongly. People assumed that the company is either in the financial or security industry, when, in fact, the company's beginnings are rooted in the software business.

Whenever such questions come to me, I had to tell them that the company was named wrongly. Unlike Richard Branson, who almost named his company Slipped Disc Records, but fortunately, named his company Virgin Records. I bought Richard Branson's Losing my Virginity about 2 years ago. Recently, I read it again and the fact stuck in my mind.

Anyway, back to the main topic, market trends. My company is in the business of doing software development, solely for the Borland Delphi market in Singapore. As a technical manager, I have written several articles, documentation, examples and demos for the Borland Delphi product line, which at the moment, includes Borland Delphi, Borland Kylix, and Delphi™ 8 for the Microsoft® .NET Framework, some of which arewere published, and some of which remains unpublished.

Borland's Delphi came into the market in Singapore around 1994 or 1995. Between Oct 1995 and Mar 1996, I purchased Borland Delphi (no version number there, which can tell you that it was the very FIRST version) for S$309 (or thereabouts). Indeed, I had discovered recently that in that same year, I sent a fax to Borland Singapore (attn'd to Pamela) to put in an order for the VCL source code, which was being sold for S$99. Over the years, I have written, developed, or participated in the design, development, implementation, conceptualization and deployment of various software, all using Delphi, including

  • an examination system named CASE (Computer Assisted System of Examination) which took 6 months to design, conceptualise and develop,
  • an OCR (optical character recognition) software based on back-propagation neural networks (this took me almost 6 months)
  • an ERP (Electronic Road Pricing) system (this took 6 months also)
  • various Web Services for purposes such as NRIC verification, sending SMS messages, among others.
  • a real-time performance Chat System

As such, it came upon me to help (heh heh, yeah, right!) those in need, and I sent in faxes to various companies that needed work to be done in Delphi.

I must be real muddle headed when I sent in those faxes, because I just discovered today, that I had dated those faxes 14 Feb 2003! Indeed, those faxes were sent only a few days ago. I should have dated it 14 Jan 2004.

After discovering the mistake, I corrected the date to today's date, and resent the faxes.