About the author
I've been working at Borland for nearly 4 weeks now. These past 3 weeks, I've discovered that it's not enough to know just technical stuff.
For example, a customer rang in the other day, wanting to learn on how to get started on programming in Delphi 2005. He asked if there were any PDF files for Delphi 2005 that teaches how to get started. He sounded very enthusiastic. Having been using Delphi since 1995 (or 96?), I've never referred to the printed documents since Delphi 2.
Unfortunately for me, at the time that he called, I was in the process of migrating the contents of my old machine (yeah, 1-2 weeks after joining Borland, I was given a faster machine!) to the new machine. And, since receiving my Delphi 2005 Architect product early this year (before I joined Borland), I've never examined the contents of the CDs, beyond installing the products (I installed OptimizeIt, ComponentOne Enterprise Studio, StarTeam, and of course, the main product, Delphi 2005. So, I didn't know or notice that there were 2 PDF files shipped with the product, and installed into the Help subdirectory off the main Delphi installed path. As a techie, I'm always interested in looking at the source codes, and seeing what has changed in each product, and what I can do with the product.)
I had to rush to my older machine, and check out the contents of the CDs. And shortly after I joined Borland, I had helped out Tim, so, I was able to leverage on his knowledge and get back to the customer, informing him that there were 2 PDFs that he could take a look at, including the specific chapters he could refer to. So, Tim saved the day for me!
So, for me, having technical knowledge is not sufficient. I need to have more knowledge in other areas as well.
A method to design records so that they're allocated on a specific byte boundary, such as 16 bytes, 512 bytes, 4096 bytes, etc.