Given that I’m fighting rectal cancer and am extremely low on energy, I am keeping this much shorter than I want to.
Recently, I learned that Rudy Velthuis passed away on 2019-05-13. Born on 1960-10-30, he passed away at only age 58.
After asking permission from his family, I wrote a small im memoriam.
We frequently encountered each other on-line in the Delphi community, especially in the early days when I was way more active on forums, newsgroups and chat channels. He was famous there, with good reason.
Though colloquially known as [WayBack] “dentist with a strong interest in programming”, he was a great Delphi programmer and very well known for thoroughly documenting the many gaps that Embarcadero left in their documentation.
In 2009, Edwin van der Kraan and I had an opportunity to have dinner with Rudy. We met at his house, where we learned he not only ran a fully fledged dentistry practice, but also was married someone who origilally was from the Philippines. A truly happy couple they were.
In retrospect, I wish we had had met in real life more often, but I’m learning the hard way that life is finite giving you only so much time to do things.
I will remember Rudy because of his knowledge, wit and odd – but great – combination of work and interests.
In the mean time, I have asked a few archival organisations (including the WayBack machine) to archive his sites:
Some of his profiles that I archived on 20190103:
- [WayBack] Rudy’s Delphi Corner – About Rudy
- [WayBack] rvelthuis (Rudy Velthuis) · GitHub
- [WayBack] Rudy Velthuis – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]
- [WayBack] User Rudy Velthuis – Stack Overflow
I love the “Kraftwerk – Autobahn” picture on his Stack Overflow profile page, so I included that song below the fold.
Related:
–jeroen