About

About Me.

My name is Craig Chapman.

I’m a software developer by trade, and as one of my technical hobbies.
I cut my teeth in programming on an 8-bit micro (the TRS-80) as early as 5 years old back in 1984, and since progressed through other at-home micro computers, to modern PCs, and have had a satisfying career in application development.
I live, breath, and sleep programming!

While I’ve dabbled in many programming languages, and even begun to write my own programming language, the majority of my career and hobby thus far, has been focused around the widely misunderstood Pascal programming language. Modern pascal is a flexible language which allows for many programming styles, cross platform development, with high level features, and while not compromising on low level development.

Pascal was once among the most used programming languages, however, today pascal is not so popular as it once was.
Somewhat ironically, this has actually been one of the strongest advantages of using Pascal. You see, the language is popular enough that there is plenty of community support, and just about anything you can do in another language you can do in Pascal, but at the same time, being less popular does often mean that you may have to do some of the heavy lifting for yourself. What do I mean? Well, if for instance you’d like to work with some API for which there is a C or C++ header, you might be lucky and find that someone has already translated the header to Pascal, or you might just have to translate it for yourself. Often, I’ve translated headers for myself despite there being alternative options available, simply because I get to learn about the technology as I do, or to ensure that the code is written to my own style or preferences.

I’ve given only one example, that of header translation, but the Pascal language offers many opportunities to learn about technologies from an outside perspective. Pascal is a language that is every bit as capable as the lower level C and C++ languages, while offering all of the modern higher level features that you might find in C# for example. Pascal therefore encourages you to approach software development from an alternative angle, which often forces you to learn about other technologies more deeply, in order to interoperate with them. To put it another way, it is said that travel broadens the mind, in the same vein I would say that pascal broadens the developer experience.

Aside from my specialty in programming, I frequently engage in other technical pass times. For instance, I’ve flown several weather balloons, carrying a camera, and a custom built tracking circuit, in order to take photographs from high altitude…

Or there was the time that I modified an old Microsoft XBOX to emulate an Amiga computer.

I’ve also modified around a dozen such XBOX computers to build a cluster computer.
I was installing computers into the dashboard of my car before modern Android and iOS devices even existed, much less had “auto” features. I’ve built my own CnC machines, including 3D printers. Essentially, if it’s technical, I’ve probably fiddled with it at some point.

Most of all however, I love programming.
My personal programming projects have included everything from a toy operating system kernel, to simple game engines, to tensor math and machine learning applications, and everything in between. While much of this was very much hobby level experimental code, and much of it now lost to the winds of time, what I get to keep is the knowledge and experience of having worked on them.

My career has included working on applications to serve many industries. I’ve worked on software in the Leisure industry, mortgage finance, banking and taxes, media, agriculture, and telecommunications. I’ve had the opportunity to work on code which monitors and optimizes some of the largest networks in the world, and worked with petabyte scale databases, and in environments with five-nines uptime requirements. From smaller enterprises to larger ones, I’ve written code, designed systems, managed teams, and best of all, I’ve enjoyed it all. While software development is not a career without its frustrations, it is ultimately very rewarding to work with others who are as passionate as you are, to write tools and applications which support everyone from the most humble, small enterprise, to mass markets.

I started blogging about my projects many years ago, which progressed to writing technical articles about programming in Delphi, the most popular commercial Pascal compiler. This activity really increased for the few years that I worked at Embarcadero Technologies, the manufacturer of this compiler. Over time, I began writing less and instead, recording videos for YouTube about Delphi, and other technical subjects which interest me.

ChapmanWorld is my blog, and YouTube channel, for sharing my projects and experience with you. Maybe you’ll find them entertaining, maybe you’ll learn something from them, or maybe you’ll teach me.

Regardless, I would like to thank you for reading, watching, and enjoying my passions with me.

• Craig Chapman.