I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be speaking at TMS Training Days 2026 in Rotterdam, and I hope to see you there! After successful events in Lille and Bruges, the TMS team is bringing this incredible two-day developer conference to the Rotterdam Marriott Hotel (right across from Rotterdam Central Station) on April 23-24, 2026.
Here's an interesting fact: When I got deeply involved in the Delphi community back in 2004, everybody was telling me "Delphi is dead." The hot new thing was .NET, and conventional wisdom said anyone still writing in Delphi was living in the past.
Guess what? It's 2026, and Delphi is still in production, still being actively developed, and I'm still making money writing code in Delphi. In fact, my entire consulting business is built partly on helping companies maintain and modernize their Delphi applications.
I learned something valuable from that experience: premature obituaries and hype cycles are terrible guides for technology decisions. Longevity comes from solving real problems reliably, not from being the hottest thing on tech Twitter.
Which brings me to today's situation.
The no-code movement is having its moment. Articles proclaim its death, its rebirth, its transformation. But amid all this noise, there's a critical distinction being lost:
Rapid Application Development (RAD) is not no-code, and the difference matters more than ever.
I've been building Windows desktop applications with Delphi for three decades. During that time, I've watched trends come and go—from the CASE tool revolution to today's no-code platforms. And I've learned something important: there's a vast difference between tools that eliminate coding and tools that accelerate coding through intelligent design.
A personal reflection on three decades of desktop development, and what comes next
I started with Delphi before most developers today wrote their first line of code. Over 30 years, I watched Borland rise, worked inside the company, and built a career helping others master the platform. I've created hundreds of videos, spoken at conferences worldwide, and earned recognition in the Delphi community.
But I'm not writing this to reminisce. I'm writing because the world has fundamentally shifted, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
The traditional setup—a developer at a desk, building Windows applications that run on office PCs—is no longer the default. People work from phones on trains. They access business systems from tablets in warehouses. Executives approve invoices from airport lounges.
The desktop isn't dead. But it's no longer the center of gravity.