Alister Christie

Alister Christie has been programming in Delphi since 1999, building and maintaining applications for the real estate, banking, racing, and legal industries here in New Zealand. In these roles, he has also used other technologies such a C#, Ruby on Rails, Android/Java, but Delphi is his preferred environment.

Alister loves to teach, and has also held training seminars on coding for his teammates, user training for clients, as well as producing the content found here. Most of his free videos also appear on YouTube, as at January 2020 have over 1.58 million views and around seven thousand subscribers.

Alister has presented at numerous online CodeRage conferences. These conferences last for an entire week with thousands of participants. The replays for all his presentations are available on this site.

Alister has been an international guest speaker at ADUG (Australasian Delphi Users Group) Symposia since his debut in 2013. Alister is honoured to be invited back to present again and again.

In 2012 Embarcadero invited Alister to join a select group of Delphi experts from around the world to form the Embarcadero MVP program for which he was the first from New Zealand.

Alister’s books “Code Better in Delphi” and “Code Faster in Delphi” will be out soon. Reserve an advance copy here.

Alister holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Victoria University, Wellington. He lives near Wellington, New Zealand.

When Alister isn’t doing all that, he’s investigating new technologies, hanging out with his family, playing guitar, investing in real estate, working out, farming his lifestyle block (hobby-farm), renovating, and running a B’n’B.

Code Faster in Delphi

Code Faster in Delphi

26/09/2020

Alister Christie
Don’t touch that mouse! Hands on the keyboard, and eyes front. You’re about to embark on a Bootcamp to tone your coding muscles, sharpen your shortcuts, fix forms faster, and accelerate your career as a Delphi Programmer. Now drop and give me twenty lines of code and five laps of that while loop. This book will help you Code Faster in Delphi through a vast array of tips, tricks and hacks to squeeze every bit of productivity out of yourself and the Delphi IDE. Some ways your coding will be made easier: By enhancing the IDE with plugins. You’ll be introduced to powerful language features such as: Interfaces Generics Anonymous Methods Get started with some of the best parts of the Run-Time Library, including: Generic Collections Parallel Programming Library Regular Expressions Enhanced RTTI FireDAC Use Meta-Programming to write and modify code to save you from horribly repetitive tasks. Improve your physical environment with easy solutions to hardware and station problems. And of course, once you’ve mastered these, where to go to get even faster and better. With over one hundred areas of improvement covered, this holistic approach to Coding Faster In Delphi will boost your productivity, and therefore your value to your clients, bosses, and colleagues.
Code better in Delphi

Code better in Delphi

10/07/2023

Alister Christie

It’s back, it’s bigger, it’s better, it’s the sequel to Alsiter Christie's previous book, it’s Code Better in Delphi.

After my last book, you can write code much faster, but without the skills to write code better, you might just end up being a highly efficient spaghetti coding machine. So stop writing that tightly coupled singleton full of duplicated code, and start reading this book.

This time, rather than looking at how fast and productive you can be, we look at quality and maintainability.

In this book, you’ll be introduced to a variety of ways you can make your code better

How DRY is that code you just wrote?
Is that class SOLID or crumblier than a very crumbly cookie?
Will Refactoring improve the quality of your code?
Are you reinventing the wheel, or should you use try Patterns?
Will testing drive you mad?
Are your bugs buggier than a giraffe stage beetle?
Do you have a handle on those dependencies?
Are your versions under control?
What to do before disaster strikes or the zombie horde arrives?
Are you Agile, or are you about to go over a waterfall?
How do you calculate the Bus number for your project?
Find out the answer to these and many more questions in this book.

But wait, there’s more…

Plugins and Tools that

Find areas of your code that might need improving.
Tell you about Complex areas of code you can simplify.
Where you are making common coding mistakes.
Help remove redundancy and orphaned code.
Let you know when code is leaker than a knitted canoe.
Automate your testing