Originally shared by Lars Fosdal
The value of an endorsement
Cleaning out my inbox today, I stumbled over a comment that I had missed on one of my old blog posts. Â It turned out to be a comment that was a bit out of the ordinary.
Hi Lars, I’m a developer of Product.X (you can check it at Product.X dot com). This is a product for [description removed]. It is for Delphi developers too. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of promotion opportunities, but even Embarcadero is among our customers! I want to ask you, is it possible to write a small article about Product.X and delphi, and then you post it on your blog? I can write about [description removed] , or about [description removed], or about [description removed]… There are a lot of topics đ Please write me your opinion. Thank you in advance!
The poster did not use his real name. Â So – I am supposed to do what? Â Post an endorsement of a product I have never heard of and never used, and you (who I donât know who are) will actually write the post it for me?Â
Needless to say, it took me mere milliseconds to decide that this wouldnât happen.
Why? Â If I am to endorse something, there are certain base requirements:
– I need to actually have been using it
– It would need to fill a particular need that I have
– It really needs to actually be of good value
– Iâd be doing my own writing, and you would know about the stuff I didnât like as well
What if you paid me to post it? Â Trust me, you canât afford the price of my integrity. So – the answer to the question: No, it is not possible. Â Had this guy posted it himself on a blog, and shared it in a community, I might have reshared it – if I found it of interest – but to act as a marketing puppet – no way.
What are your requirements for writing an endorsement, or post the words of someone else on your blog? Would you endorse for a free license? Â For cash?
What would you do? Â
#some  #marketing  #integrity Â
(Image: www.innerchildcrochet.com via Google Image search)
I’d endorse something I had a positive experience with. I’d not post the words of someone else.
I endorse your message.
Picky, picky, picky. đ And I suppose you want it to be well written, bug-free, with lifetime updates, and supporting all versions from D7 forward. LOL! But it is weird. Hard to believe anyone seeking an endorsement would use a phony name. What was he smoking?
Well written is a boon. Â Bugs exist, but I’m willing to pay for updates. Â I only need support for the two latest versions as I still find it worth while to keep updating Delphi and with it, my apps.
But yeah – I didn’t see that one coming.
Lars Fosdal Well, unless you use TMS components; then you need a continuing subscription. Frequent updates are the rule, and new components are added, as well. Not always free of unintended features, but the value remains high, overall.Â
We subscribe to their compo pack. I do love their grid, but when you start exploiting it, there are plenty warts and strange side effects, and I am still annoyed about them not fixing ALL hints and warnings in release code.
Lars Fosdal Agreed. I found a number of “interesting” behaviors when using the TFormControlEditLink to put other components into the grid as custom editors. Including some where the behavior in a cell was affected by what was in the cell above. Fun stuff. However, to their credit, once I sent an app which demonstrated the problems, they did fix them. Sometimes, though, these side-trips to isolate misbehavior can be frustrating, when I have work held up because of the issues, and am building test apps, to prove the existence of defects.Â
If it can be reproduced, it can be fixed đ
Not quite as easy if you depend on some huge infrastructure to replicate the issue, but some times – trying to do things just a little differently can solve the issue.
Lars Fosdal And sometimes not. I think with the grid, there is a general expectation that behaviors are column-oriented. But I found it useful to present a number of two column grids, where the left column was captions, and the right was data cells, often with custom editors. That’s how I found the oddities.
Also, in the grids, because of row and column hiding, and they way they evolved, there are multiple schemes for access to cells, and some event handlers present column and row indices suited to only the displayed columns and rows, while others present them in the context of all rows and columns, whether visible or not. I suggested renaming the parameters to account for the difference, but as it would break users’ code, I think it is unlikely to be implemented.Â