Through thirty years of Claris FileMaker and web app development, we’ve always found it essential to keep learning and searching, to continue asking the questions and exploring the bounds of what our chosen software platforms can do and accomplish. With the wealth of information to find and review, along with new technologies and updates to keep track of, staying on top of the latest and greatest can seem a daunting task.

In an expert-run industrialized economy, there’s a lot of pressure to be the one who’s sure, the person with all the answers. …

Being open to new ideas and being willing to shift patterns and habits is crucial. Keeping the allure of new and flashy from overtaking the base of proven technique and knowledge-gained-through-years is tricky. Perfecting the ability to do the day-to-day work of programming and moving projects along – while continuing to expand understandings and insights – takes lots of practice. That practice is helped by community – a place to share, and learn, and vent. A place to observe, and wonder, and ask.

Far more valuable is someone who has all the questions. The ability to figure out what hasn’t been figured out and see what hasn’t been seen is a significant advantage…

When confronted with a challenging programming situation, one of the very first things we do is go to the forums and the blogs of other software companies to search through the existing information on a topic. That’s one reason we maintain this blog, our YouTube channel, and our selection of demos so intentionally. To keep learning, keep growing the body of details about our field, and so that we can help others do so along their own professional paths.

Portage Bay puts great value on continually expanding our knowledge and perspectives about everything Claris. We hold twice weekly dev meetings with our own internal team, to chip away at areas where we are stuck and to share new things we have discovered. We test and try. We iterate. We change course. It is from these discussions and experiences that most of our blog posts, videos, and demos are born. 

We’ve been adding regularly to our blog for nearly ten years now and we welcome you to browse the categories for yourself. We took 171 titles from the ten years of our blog, threw them into a word cloud, and are pretty happy with the results. It’s an accurate representation of the focus of our workdays. We imagine you’re finding it quite familiar as well!  

Sign up for our monthly newsletter and you’ll get an email on the last day of each month, with links to our newest posts. We also send a quarterly email recapping Claris Connect updates.

From our blog topics we’ve built a fledgling YouTube library and our recent aim is to add a new video every few weeks. The videos usually come from segments of the Claris Connect Meetup we established, as well as snippets from our staff developer meetings or recent demos.

We also offer an assortment of free add-ons and demos that you can download from our website. Even in this area, we continue to revise and update when needed. We’ve offered the Map Widget for sale for the last several years but an upcoming blog post in November will cover new details and will announce that the Map Widget will now be free.

We’re committed to always learning and are glad to share those gleanings with those who want to learn alongside us. We hope you’ll take some time to look through these areas where we’ve created content for ourselves, for you, and for our programming community. Use our Contact Form below to let us know what questions come up and about places where you think we can continue to evolve. You can also schedule a free consultation to see how we might be of help with your current or proposed FileMaker solution.

Rarest of all is the person with the humility (and confidence) to realize that even the list of questions can remain elusive. Finding the right questions might be the very thing we need to do.

Seth Godin

What questions have you been asking lately?