As you can read in details at https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/b/blog/posts/2018-spirit-of-delphi-award-winner at the last CodeRage conference Embarcadero resumed the old tradition of giving recognition to an active member of the Delphi developers community, picking contributors in various areas. The blog post above by Jim McKeeth has the entire history of the prize and also the motivation of this year prize, awarded to Cary Jensen.
Having known Cary for a long time and considering him a personal friend, I’m clearly biased, but it is true it was odd to realize he never won in the old days. This is a well deserved prize to this career as Delphi mentor, book author, trainer, and consultant — among other things. Jim was also kind to send old winners an update icon for their site:
This is a little more modern than the old one still on my site:
However, I also want to use the opportunity to share the actual prize I received, which is still around in my office these days. Actually 2 prizes. One is a plate with the award. Nice. The second and the one I really like is a box of Delphi 5 (still complete in terms of content) signed by the R&D team of the time. Images are below.
Now all we need is to maintain this new tradition. I already have a fairly long list of Delphi community outstanding contributors who deserve the prize!