I’ve been holding off on posting for a bit, because there’s some news I’ve been itching to share, but was asked to keep quiet. Until now.
I’ve had the honor of being accepted as a speaker at the 2017 FileMaker Developer Conference. And that’s very exciting.
The conference is being held this year in Phoenix, Arizona, at the JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge conference center. That’s the same venue where FileMaker held the 2008 conference. It’s a great venue.
This will be my ninth DevCon, and first year presenting. The topic will be abstraction – how we use different techniques and FileMaker functionality to achieve greater modularization and portability with our solutions. One of the great things about FileMaker is that everything is really automatic. But that comes with a bit of a price. Unlike many other programming environments, FileMaker doesn’t tie everything to the names of the different objects in the solution (like tables, fields, layouts, scripts, etc.). It uses an internal object library where everything is assigned a unique ID. The big advantage with doing things that way is if I need to change the name of something, I can do it without breaking large chunks of functionality. That’s a boon to the developer who doesn’t want to go hunting all through a solution for all occurrences of “client”. But the downside is that my code winds up being not very portable between solutions, and I sometimes have to design really ugly scripting with lots of If – Else logic.
So my session this year will be all about how we break free of some of those constraints without losing the speed and convenience FileMaker provides. If you’re a FileMaker enthusiast, or even just a seeker, I can heartily recommend attending DevCon. It’s chock full of great information from some very talented people (not really including me). And if you’re there, look me up! I’d love to meet you.
If you want to ask anything about the conference, FileMaker in general, or our business here, please don’t hesitate to contact us. See you in Phoenix!
