Joe, John, and Xandon were able to attend Claris Engage this week, at the Apple campus in Austin. They recorded a FileMaker DevCast session while still in the capital of Texas, to recap some of their observations and experiences about the latest news and trends in the FileMaker ecosystem.
Dan Smiley joined as our ever-illustrious host, along with a few more of our Portage Bay staff – Mike Ross, and our newest developers, Evan and Jillian.
AI remains a prominent topic both at the conference and in our discussion, along with thoughts about LLMs, DevOps, Claris Studio, the Apple campus, and cheese.
Jump on in and listen to hear more of the details. View the YouTube video below, or catch the DevCast on these channels:
Also check out our FileMaker Events & Conferences page, to get the next events added to your calendar!
Xandon’s session on Leveraging Local LLMs in FileMaker was standing room only. We’re grateful for the support, interest, and encouragement! We’ll be rerecording his session soon, for our YouTube channel.
If AI can bring about these improvements and iterations from a wee little prompt, think about what it can do for your FileMaker solution. Contact us to talk about the possibilities.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
AI integration, FileMaker development, Claris Engage, DevOps, large language models, AI sessions, keynote speech, FileMaker conference, AI tools, FileMaker scripts, AI productivity, FileMaker solutions, AI transcription, FileMaker networking, AI future.
SPEAKERS
Dan Smiley 00:00
Yeah, yeah, Claude. I have Claude on my phone, but, and I even subscribed, but I really haven’t been using it, so I’m, I don’t think I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep it. I think chat GPT is
Xandon Frogget 00:11
better, yeah, claude’s really good for coding. Okay, well, I’ve
Dan Smiley 00:15
been using it mostly for writing. So chat GPT and good for writing? Yeah, we partnered up. Over the last couple days, I’ve been writing newsletter articles for the Washington State maritime cooperative newsletter. And I used to hate writing, but now with my little friend, man, I love writing. It’s the greatest
Dan Smiley 00:43
I was what I was reading the news yesterday morning, and I started, I was like, starting to ask it questions, to clarify some news articles. And before I knew it, chat GPT and I had written a whole op ed. Yeah, I said Suzanne to read it before I send it to the Seattle Times, to make sure I don’t get in trouble. And I gotta go back and fact check, because, you know, chat GPT,
Xandon Frogget 01:12
yeah? Like, here’s tossing the deep research,
Joe Ranne 01:14
yeah. No one cares about that anymore. No one
Xandon Frogget 01:17
it’ll cite your sources.
Dan Smiley 01:18
No longer any such thing as conflict of interest anymore, either, right?
Xandon Frogget 01:22
No, as long as you’re citing sources, you can do whatever, say whatever you
Dan Smiley 01:26
want, say whatever you want, all right? What we’re going to do here on this podcast, it’s
Xandon Frogget 01:31
not plagiarizing when you put it in quotes and reference
Dan Smiley 01:37
creative content, right? We’ll call this a comedy show.
John Newhoff 01:43
This is all that’s wrong.
Dan Smiley 01:47
Bailey’s show is what this is. It’s
Joe Ranne 01:49
Always Sunny, right? Sunny here yesterday, it was 74 degrees here in Yeah, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That’s what they do, basically. Oh, but then they call themselves a comedy, and they’re just, anyways, I love that show. Oh,
John Newhoff 02:04
they Well, we are a comedy. It would be the first file maker comedy show. We wouldn’t be. We would be trendsetters, that’s for sure.
Dan Smiley 02:11
Would it? Would it? Would it be funny? I guess?
John Newhoff 02:16
Well, we would
Dan Smiley 02:21
have Brandynn leave this part in. So the the pre game the pre game show, yeah,
Joe Ranne 02:27
I will say I had three people come up to me and say, Aren’t you that guy from that podcast? So, yeah, there are people watching it at at engage.
Dan Smiley 02:38
It’s worth it. I’ve had the same thing for my other podcast, where I was up in Alaska last year for a drill in Anchorage, and coast guard chief petty officer came up and go and said, I’ve watched your podcast all the time, right? That I have street cred in the room,
John Newhoff 02:59
right? That’s a that’s a lot of validation right there. Yeah, super great. I gotta start my
Xandon Frogget 03:04
new entry line. And so, like, have you been working out? I’m gonna be like, Dude, I saw your podcast. Even if they don’t have a podcast, gonna really well,
Joe Ranne 03:14
given the state of current podcasting, you’ll be 75% correct every time. Yeah, that you
Dan Smiley 03:54
Well, it’s time for the final record. Dev cast an exciting episode follow following the Engage conference in Austin, Texas. I’m your citizen developer and host, Dan smiley, and we’re joined by the whole cast of characters from portage bay solutions. Hi, Johns, you got your team there still in the hotel room or the Airbnb in Austin?
John Newhoff 04:18
Yeah, we’re we’re at our Airbnb. We’re in a really nice residential neighborhood full of trees about I walked back and forth to the conference yesterday about a about a mile. So we’re nice and close. Texas has trees. There are trees in Texas. There are some Austin’s pretty nice. I was before the conference, I was down in the Big Bend area for a few days checking out Big Bend National Park, and there’s no trees down well, very few trees down there.
Dan Smiley 04:48
Gotcha, Mike, how are you doing there? How was it engaged for you?
Mike Ross 04:52
Well, I was, I’m not at engage. I’m sitting this one out so but. I’m doing well. Thank you. Welcome.
Dan Smiley 05:01
Are we back? We got Well, John, why don’t you have the rest of the crowd there with you? Introduce themselves? Oh
Joe Ranne 05:07
yes, Joe, I, as usual, I brought a bike, so I’m riding around town, exploring different areas that I haven’t been to before. So it’s been, it’s been nice to engage, just to clear that up in
Dan Smiley 05:21
Austin, is it writer friendly
Joe Ranne 05:25
for the type of riding I like to do? Yeah. I mean, I like weird side paths and dirt, dirt, you know, trails and, you know, odd places, so I kind of get all over the place, and don’t really worry about traffic that much.
Dan Smiley 05:38
Gotcha. Zanden,
Xandon Frogget 05:40
yep. Hey everybody. Xanden over here, yeah, I, I was actually presenting this year at engage. Had a really cool session on leveraging your local LLM for file maker. And, yeah, it went really well, but I spent a ridiculous amount of time prepping and stressing and having anxiety about it, because it’s my first time presenting, so it I think it went really well, but it was exciting and nerve wracking at the same time. I only made it to one because I was focused so much on getting the presentation together, I only made it to one session, and it was a great session, but I feel like I kind of missed out on all the wonderful sessions.
John Newhoff 06:21
I missed a lot of sessions too, but I think Zanden is underselling his presentation went really well. The room was standing room only, yeah. So yeah, it was a really good session. I’m looking forward to watching. Fortunately, the sessions are recorded, so we’ll probably probably take, kind of prioritize the sessions and watch the videos and then talk about them in our our weekly dev meetings.
Dan Smiley 06:45
Oh, that’s cool. I look forward to hearing about it, the large language model thing. And we’ve got some new folks with us that I haven’t met. And we’ll start with Julian. Tell us about yourself.
Jillian 06:57
Well, I’m I’m fairly new here at portage bay.
Dan Smiley 07:01
Where did you come from? What were you doing before portage bay? Well,
Jillian 07:04
I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life, been in the marketing and design area, but FileMaker was kind of always a part of my skill set. I just really wasn’t doing it professionally. And most recently, I had launched a physical magazine in my local community for the B to B businesses. Was really great, and formerly a professional photographer, so I had a photography studio and business several years ago. So that’s awesome. So
Dan Smiley 07:41
you got into FileMaker development because you were using the product yourself.
Jillian 07:46
know, it goes way, way back in the early days of the 1990s I think, and I was working for a temporary agency. There was a temp agency that focused on people that knew how to use Macintoshes because that was like the big new computer platform. And I got a position, a temporary position, at the University of Pennsylvania in the publishing department. They had a contact database built in FileMaker, and that was my first exposure to it, and it wasn’t really even part of what they asked me to do. But right away I was like making it better and integrating things. And I thought, well, this is I just love this. My job after that, was with a advertising creative agency, and when they found out that I had FileMaker skills, they had a client that came to them that had a system built on FileMaker, so I became the person that had to learn how to use FileMaker to help them. They sent me for training. I got to go to my first FileMaker conference way back when, and then fast forward to maybe within the past 10 years, I worked for a company that had built a vertical market solution based on FileMaker. I ended up helping them to improve their system. So it’s kind of like been on again, off again and and I really only made the decision this past August to refocus and retrain completely, kind of focus on that skill set. I was kind of really tired of doing the marketing and the creative stuff, and I was really kind of enamored with some of the more tech advances that were happening with FileMaker.
Dan Smiley 09:27
Well, that’s a great story. And you’re, I kind of got there in a similar way. So that’s, that’s awesome. I look forward to working with you on some projects.
John Newhoff 09:38
Jillian’s working on easy IAP right now.
Dan Smiley 09:40
Are you? Okay, little, there you go. We need to talk more. Evan,
Evan Meeks 09:48
yes, sir. So I came from the audio video industry, where I was there for about 10 years as a video engineer. About four years ago now or so, I wanted to switch into the tech space. And I went through some data science boot camps and classes and whatnot, before I got a job at I point solutions, which is a vertical market for home theater, business management software. It’s all FileMaker based. So I got in, got my foot in the door into the FileMaker industry over there, and just fell in love with it, really. And here about, I guess it’s been about a month and a half now or so, I found John, and the rest is history. Really got hired on as a FileMaker, developer and server administrator for the company.
Dan Smiley 10:37
Well, that’s, well, that’s great. We’re gonna, we need to talk about servers offline later. So yes, sir. So you guys are who all went to engage, just the three of you there in the in the room. Okay, well, let’s, let’s start with, with what you guys thought overall. I mean, I was there last year. I couldn’t make it this year, I thought that the Apple campus space was really a nice location to do this. How did Apple space feel to you this year?
John Newhoff 11:07
I thought it was, you know, it’s somewhat the same. Obviously, the food is good. I guess one of my takeaways from this conference was kind of, you know, some of the energy from the Claris team was a little more obvious than past years, I think, for whatever reason, and I’m not privy to the inner workings at Claris, really, but I think the new CEO, Ryan McCann, has kind of energized that their staff a bit, and I was kind of excited to see that. I think there’s going to be some interesting new kind of slants in their marketing. And I’m just kind of excited to see that, that excitement from them, that was one thing. One of my takeaways, anyway,
Dan Smiley 11:51
did they, did they talk about any kind of a new direction or new focus for FileMaker? Is he bringing a new vision to the product.
John Newhoff 12:01
Well, I think there, we’re actually a little bit uncertain of our NDAs on some of what we saw at the conference. So we’ll, we’ll go a little bit light on exact details, but they’re obviously continuing to integrate AI into the platform.
Xandon Frogget 12:18
Big, big focus. It was actually from my from my vantage point, it there’s a huge focus shift on AI, of course, as it, you know, pertains to almost everything. But there was a huge focus with both the keynote speech, as well as several other sessions, really focusing on integration and some really cool stuff that they’re releasing in the next version about AI, and then even a longer term goal of doing some really the sort of the things you actually are expecting to have in FileMaker are are planned for the future. Again, with skirting that NDA, we’re not, we’re not quite sure how much we can talk about, but it’s looking really good for a horizon.
Dan Smiley 13:00
So when you talk about, and I understand the NDA part, but you got my juices flowing. So they’re, they’re an Apple company, right? And Apple spent a lot of time talking about Apple intelligence, although I think I just heard on Mac break weekly, they’re not going to get it out into, like, fully into the iPhone until next year. There have been some delays with Apple intelligence. But do you think there’s any possibility they’ll build they’ll just build that right into this product, since they’re the same company, or are they really looking at allowing you to make API calls into these other models, chat, GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Blank face, yeah, talk about it. Well,
John Newhoff 13:48
we can talk to generality. I think they’re going to do based on what we saw. I think they’re going to do what you would expect them to do, which is to which is to build support for AI technology deeper into the product. I think both, both for the front end user, the end user of FileMaker, and probably equally important for for us as developers, what you can do with AI tools as software developers these days is pretty amazing, and it would be crazy for for players and filemaker not to provide that those kinds of capabilities to FileMaker developers. It would put us all at at a competitive disadvantage. So, you know, we’re looking forward to seeing some, some integration of of AI into development capabilities, for sure, yeah, and they’ve
Xandon Frogget 14:39
already got a lot of AI integration already, but they’re really polishing it up for the next release, for features that you can have in there. So I’m excited. It’s, yep, you know, I was a little worried going into it about how much, how fast biomarker was going to transition, but it looks like they’re, they’ve got a good road map in there. They’re going to embrace AI and go forward. Uh, with all the things you’re kind of hoping for,
John Newhoff 15:02
I think there were at least eight AI sessions, including xandens, maybe, maybe nine or 10, but, but a pretty high percentage of the sessions overall were AI focused. Certainly obvious that Claris is treating that pretty seriously.
Dan Smiley 15:17
Yeah, it would be nice to be able to go into a developer tool, AI window and query AI about scripts that you that will then be, you know, formatted correctly, that you can just pull right right into the script development window. Like, you know, I use chat GPT to help me with with with scripts and planning and other things in my file maker work all the time, but you can’t cut and paste out of it really right, and it doesn’t get it right all the time. I did one where I was like, yeah, by the way, chat GPT. That’s not actually a file maker function. It’s like, Oh, my bad. Here. Try it like this. I’m like, okay, but you know, talk a good game, and most of it’s right, but that’s absolutely wrong. I went to a session on
John Newhoff 16:11
on taking poorly structured data and using AI to get it into a structured format yesterday, and the speaker had an interesting observation about how the more the more specific you ask the AI to be, the more you’re encouraging it to hallucinate, because it really wants to give you what you’re asking for. And if you give it 10 data points, and say you want all 10 filled, it’s going to put something in each data point regardless, regardless of how accurate it is, so you’re almost better off being a little bit looser. Was what was? What the speaker had found. I thought that was pretty interesting. That
Dan Smiley 16:50
is, although it seems like how it’s responding changes day to day.
John Newhoff 16:57
Yeah, well, the models are changing constantly. So what
Dan Smiley 17:01
was true? You know, yesterday may or may not be true today. And useful to have two, two different models open at the same time, ask them both the same question. And you know, see what, see what you you get out of that. That was part
John Newhoff 17:15
of what Daniel was showing in his local LLM presentation. Also, well, tell us about
Dan Smiley 17:20
your presentation.
Xandon Frogget 17:23
It was it was fun. Basically went in on how to install and showed some examples of integration with AI using the new Gemini or GEMMA three from from Google. Gemma three, not Gemini is the source one, and it was fun. It was fun. I was cramming the day before to put together the demo part, you know, of being able to drop stuff in a container and filemaker and then a file maker push that by a API call to use your local LM that you’d be hosting and hosting for this particular session. I did a llama with Open Web UI as the front end. And it was, it was super cool. I took a screen grab of some table data and dropped that in a container, and it output it to see to a JSON format. And then from there, took it into HTML format, and from there I could open in a web viewer and see it in a table format in the Web Viewer. And I didn’t really have to do anything other than the initial scripting to submit those data API calls. So that was really exciting for me, with the models coming out, new and multi modal models. It’s, it’s really, it’s really, I think, changing day by day, definitely, and really, really looking cool. Oh yeah, I did the cheese. I did I did an image. I like cheese, right? So, met market in Seattle. They have a some really good cheeses, and they have a cheese mongers that are there, and I bought some cheese, and I took a picture of just the cheese package and and, you know the information on the front, and I asked it to tell me about the cheese and and tell me what it pairs well with. And it gave me this wonderful, wonderful output, talking about the cheese, where it comes from, what it pairs with, all of the different elements. And, you know, those, those are some of the things, like, just from a an image of a product, you can get all of this detailed information. So for if you’re working in marketing, you know, your jobs, like half done is really cool,
John Newhoff 19:29
yeah. Or I can imagine other industries we, you know, take a picture of a take a picture of an oil skimmer, and you can have a web page up with details about the what it does and what it’s used for, and and whatever, in a couple of minutes. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing how fast it takes visual photo of visual data and converts it to, you know, structured data that you can display on the web.
Xandon Frogget 19:54
Yeah. And it does a really pretty good job of doing text. So for host. Locally. It’s really, really impressive. Of course, the you know your your cloud models, like, if you’re using chat, GPT or or Claude, they’re several months ahead. But what you’re getting in the open source for local hosting, you just wait a few months, the models get just as good as they were. So you’re, you’re maybe three months behind the trend. So if you can do it in chat, GBT today, or Claude, give it three months, you’ll have it in the open source. I’m pretty sure you know. So it’s really, it’s a, it’s a fast paced, exciting time to be working with AI.
Speaker 1 20:33
So I really enjoyed Dan and presentation, because I had never heard of Velveeta cheese before. There’s so many things you can do with it. It’s amazing.
20:45
It was Manchego cheeses
Dan Smiley 20:52
and the individual wrapper.
Xandon Frogget 20:57
Yes, what wines go well with that elevator. That’s craft American cheese product.
Dan Smiley 21:05
I don’t think there’s any actual cow in it.
Mike Ross 21:10
Use it for lamination, an
John Newhoff 21:14
industrial lubricant,
Dan Smiley 21:17
like it’s a mu it’s museum putty. Now
John Newhoff 21:20
we’re going to get exactly the podcast,
Dan Smiley 21:26
as long as you laugh, it’s comedy, right? And if it’s
John Newhoff 21:29
right, we covered this
Dan Smiley 21:32
so, so could we? Could we use that technique of dropping, you know, a document or something into a container and processing it with the LLM to create dashboard modules
Xandon Frogget 21:50
like you can so if you’re not having to worry about posting locally, like I did this whole piece on a genealogy because I had a Couple of genealogy books from my cousin had scanned in from the family’s genealogy, and there’s like 750 pages. I took them all, I used AI to write a little app that broke them out into from the PDF that they were in, into individual pages and graphics, and then submitted those through an API call to have at this time, it was Claude 3.7 to do the translation or transcription. And it did a great job. It did an awesome job. It cost me a little bit. Cost me like $20 in API calls, but, but 750 pages, and I’d already like gone through trying to use acrobats, OCR and other OCR software, and they, you know, they put weird characters in there. Screw it all up. Formatting gets lost. Claude did an awesome job of putting that together. So then I compiled it all into a single document that I could throw into into Google’s notebook, LM, and, you know, created some podcasts from from the documentation. So they’re Bob casters in Google’s notebook. Lm, which, if you haven’t used it, is really, really cool. They sit and talk about whatever it is you feed them. So I gave them these books, and they just were going on. You can interject and ask questions, and then they’ll diverge onto different tangents. So if you’re interested in, like, particular story lines in the genealogy, now that it was in there, I could both share it with other family members, so they could do the same thing. But then I could also ask questions about, like, Well, tell me about the wagons that you know, so and so is using on that trail. When it broke down, what, what, what, exactly did that look like? And they would go into it or or tell me about that does, what war was that, that they were in, and what area were they in? And because you’re, you’re leveraging, you know, large language model. It’s, the detail is incredible. Again, it gives you so much scope. So, so flexible. So anyway, so really fun stuff. You can do that today, right in from, from FileMaker, push it into Claude. It’s, it’s amazing, yeah, for document scanning, I also did it for because, you know, ultimately, sometime in your life, you’re going to end up with the documents for court, and you’re going to be like, I don’t know, should I, how should I respond to this, you know, or, or what’s my best legal course? And hiring a lawyer to give you feedback on that is really tough. And the court documents, they’re never in a digital format other than a PDF of the scans, so you need to transcribe it somehow again, you know, having AI take care of the transcription, I had a really detailed document that I could then submit to, to AI to then ask questions and say, What does this mean? Exactly? What are the parameter, you know, break it down. Analyze it. How can I respond to this legal matter? Right? Without getting into my personal. Yeah, legal underpinnings, but super, super helpful. And if you’re in a lawyer firm, doing it in a local LLM, you know, for privacy is a big, big opportunity, and big, big deal. So,
Dan Smiley 25:12
yeah, well, sounds like there was a lot of LLM presentations there is. Was that the largest buzz around the conference this year, or were the people excited about something else?
John Newhoff 25:28
I think AI, yeah, it’s hard to get away from it these days. I think it was probably the biggest buzz. You know, Clarence just had a new CEO. I think I mentioned earlier, Ryan McCann take over. So there’s certainly a little bit of buzz people talking about that, a little bit detect any other trends or buzzes that we
Speaker 1 25:54
saw there. Roof guys tend to, they really went all in on the standardization and DevOps models just giving people hints and advice and how tos on what they do from their daily production model and what tools they use, it was I really like that conversation of standardization, and especially now in the age of like true DevOps deployment in FileMaker, mostly true. It’s nice to see other development, especially a company like roof guys, doing really good things in that space. Yeah,
John Newhoff 26:31
I went to a session on DevOps and filemaker, and it’s not an area that the FileMaker world has really focused a lot of tension on historically, and it’s not as easy to do in FileMaker or manage in filemakers some other platforms. So tools that are coming out from some of these vendors now auto from proof guys, Devon from I don’t remember, Devin FM and I think 360 deploy from 360 works, these tools becoming available to automate the process and make it easier for us to use, you know, best practice development and deployment techniques. I think is a really, a really positive direction that things are moving in the FileMaker world.
Dan Smiley 27:17
What do you what do you mean when you talk about DevOps? What does that include?
John Newhoff 27:29
The video recordings will probably be paid attendees, I suspect. But DevOps is a sort of a way of describing a full circle view of writing and deploying FileMaker systems. So not just here’s some code, throw it on a throw it on a server and start using it. Or even what a lot of FileMaker developers do, including ourselves, where we end up working on and making changes in a production environment, so that you know your client is subject to all of the bugs that that you might introduce into the system as you’re doing development. And as we all know, bugs are normal and natural part of development. They’re not. It’s not really possible to avoid them unless you have a proper DevOps cycle where you’re where you’re writing the code in in a dev version, moving a copy to a test server, a staging server, for proper testing, and then deploying it to a production server, managing the release cycle, monitoring the servers, monitoring the backup so, so just treating the whole FileMaker development and deployment process as a complete a complete cycle, and not just get it onto the server, and so that that should lead to More stable code, more more successful deployments, happier customers and tools, some of these tools that are coming out make it possible to do it a lot more efficiently, so we can get we can manage a dev environment and a production environment, and move code between the two a lot more efficiently than we used to be able to do. Mike,
Mike Ross 29:19
yes, my question that I have is concerning the kind of the vibe of engage itself. This is the second engage that was on the Apple campus before, when they were called dev cons, they’d be held in a hotel. And a lot of the fun part of of going to a conference like this is being able to network, and what happens in between the sessions. And there was some criticism last year that networking things are not quite localized. I’m wondering what sort of improvement. Movements with it, what, what, what they learned from last year to this year, and how that made a better conference. The guys can address that, what they what they felt.
Xandon Frogget 30:11
Yeah, for me, I think that they did some really, really nice things. They gave more time between sessions so you had more time to be able to to connect with other people and other people that attended. It was in a familiar place. It felt way more relaxed this year than it was last year. So I I like the facility. The Apple facility was really nice. All of the AV equipment is really awesome for presenting. It was super helpful for them, recording and everything. So it a lot better than we would had experience that I’d experienced at other dev cons, file maker events. So I really like that aspect of it. It was way more relaxed. It felt for me, even though I was having anxiety about presenting, but, but the the cool, the cool part was having that extra time between sessions to really take and engage with other people and have that network, networking opportunity, and not feeling rushed, like, oh crap, we gotta get on in the next session, And then you get into the next session and you session, and you know, you’re just being that a lot of information, but you don’t have a moment to sort of compile it and reflect on it. And so I think that was a huge for me, that was a really positive takeaway this year.
John Newhoff 31:33
Yeah, I would agree completely about what seems like an intentional bit of extra time in between sessions to allow people to chat. One thing I think about the space at Apple is that it’s there’s a lot of different sized rooms. You know, there’s the rooms that the some of the sessions are in, there’s and then there’s rooms that are as small as one person that can go into it and and work for a few minutes, or a small room with three three chairs around a table. So there’s a lot of little places that you can you can pull yourself away into to to work on a presentation or chat with some people about something. So that’s that’s kind of nice. I think they also worked harder to get everybody into a separate space for the meals. We had three different events in the in the large apple kind of cafe, Apple cafeteria, kind of place. They call it Cafe max. And so we had three events in there. So that gave a pretty big opportunity for chatting with people and running, running into different people. And so I I get what you’re saying or what somebody might say. You know, there’s not that opportunity to just meet in the hotel bar, kind of at random and sit there having a having a beer, that that opportunity doesn’t exist. But there’s a lot of opportunity to run into people and meet and talk a bit, and then there was a lot of people are, we aren’t staying at the conference hotel. There’s a complex a few miles away called the domain, which is really just a shopping mall, but I think the conference hotels are down there, and so if you’re, if you’re staying in the conference hotel, there’s at least a little bit of opportunity to meet people down that way. Although we didn’t, we weren’t down
Xandon Frogget 33:19
last night. Oh yeah, last year, last year I had this year. I was just like, Yeah, I had to decompress. Man, that the domain last year was a lot of fun. Chat,
Mike Ross 33:34
So, so a follow up question on that sessions were only two days? Do you feel that was enough time? Should there have been a third day? I’m not talking about the training day.
John Newhoff 33:46
an interesting question. I i feel like because, because I was going to a couple of non, you know, non public sessions, I was going to a couple of smaller meetings with some people and helping zand and prep for his presentation. I probably only went to half the sessions, and they didn’t start doing the sessions until 130 on Tuesday, so there was really only a day and a half of sessions. And so I think it’s a good question, is that enough? I don’t feel like I got to enough stuff, but I’m planning on watching some of the videos I’m I’m looking forward to the full access conference and in the fall, where there’s going to be a little bit more technical content. Do you want to say a tiny bit about that, Mike, as long as it’s coming
Mike Ross 34:38
up? Yeah, so myself and John Howell data experience are have formally announced that we are putting on a unconference in the the Silicon Valley area at a retreat. And our intention there is to not just have lots of sessions, but. Divide an intimate atmosphere where people can really do a lot of networking and get together and but we’re going to put a little bit more structure in it, and we are going to try to pack three sessions at a time of variable lengths over basically four days. So, you know, good 40 sessions with a wide you know, there will be aI sessions, but there’s other topics to discuss, as well as not only technical but work life, stuff that I that is kind of only really appropriate in that particular atmosphere. Looking forward to that. It’s challenging putting something like this together, but we’ve got a lot of momentum going, and our will, our registration will start on March 31 another question about engage. What was the attendance numbers? You know, any idea,
Joe Ranne 35:55
you know, they didn’t announce anything that I heard. You guys hear anything just from word of mouth, but attendance was lower than expected from
Xandon Frogget 36:02
the keynote. There was a lot of people at the keynote. If that was a number, it seemed like a pretty decent room. Room was full. Oh, real quick. I just do want to point out, like, I’m all about AI. So I was like, there’s lots of AI. They had a lot of real sessions that were not about AI. Like, there were some great right, plug in ones, and also there were some really good sessions I didn’t get to attend. Well, I talked to the presenters about them, and I’m like, Oh man, I wish I would have been able to get it. So I’m going to have to watch one on the video afterwards. But
Mike Ross 36:33
yeah, right. Well, Claris does have its initiatives, so they make certain things a focus of their conference. And definitely AI has been that this year. So, you know, a lot of people will submit speaker requests, and they’re not accepted because that not the big focus that they want. And you know, they’ll try to put some other things in there. But you could really tell that AI was, was the was the draw for that, but there’s a lot of other stuff out there as well. So
John Newhoff 37:04
there’s for sure, no question, I think, for us as developers, getting a handle on how AI affects our productivity and our development habits is a is a pretty big topic. Makes sense to me that Claris would be, would be putting a lot of attention on it
Dan Smiley 37:24
without if you’re not using it, you’re falling behind. Everyone else is going to be
John Newhoff 37:29
using it.
Mike Ross 37:31
So I I’m a bit of a little bit of a curmudgeon on this. I’m not a curmudgeon about many things, but but I think there’s appropriate use for AI. And my only teaser on that is that I have given sessions on development where you know the old phrase, the perfect gets in the way of the good. And I think in some cases, with AI, the good gets way. It gets in the way of the perfect. And that’s just something for you to chew on. I don’t want to make this a big debate or anything like that. I mean, I I’ve used AI, but I think there’s, there’s time and place, so we’ll just let it go at that at this point.
John Newhoff 38:22
Yeah, we don’t want to get into a religious debate at the moment. No,
Xandon Frogget 38:28
you know, I’m a little bit of an evangelist, and I think I imagine like one day I’m not too far into the future. And I think this is a very realistic expectation, and I’m not going to give it anything away, but I think we’re at a time when you can soon to expect to get a time because you get in another IDs. So just to preface it, but that you’ll be able to ask AI to generate scripts and review scripts and code comment scripts and create calculations and all these things you can do currently, but based into FileMaker, I expect that we’re probably, probably going to see something if AI hasn’t surpassed that as a necessity in another year. So I would expect that FileMaker, because there’s they’re following, it’s to be relevant, they’re going to follow what everybody else is doing, because everybody expects it. And I, I believe that we’re going to see that fairly soon. Yeah. I mean, you
Mike Ross 39:24
can I, I don’t disagree with that, and I’ve used those tools in that manner, but sometimes AI could be used as a principle for fuzzy logic. Yeah,
Xandon Frogget 39:38
Joe and I were just talking about that, like we’ve got some calculations in one of our solutions, right? And calculations are really complicated for for custom functions, and there’s no code comments or anything. And we’re like, why don’t we put that into AI? Let it go through it, tell us what’s going on. Put comments back into that so we can then put the. Custom function back into FileMaker and understand it better, or recognize bugs that might be there. And the coding that we’re getting out of the frontier models right now is really good, and it can pick up all sorts of miniscule things that you’re just not going to pick up when you’re looking at, you know, through 200 lines of a custom function,
Mike Ross 40:19
my only observation is that you just need to keep a very nuanced eye what you do, yeah? So, yeah, don’t take what AI gives you. It’s blind faith. So there are hallucinations, yeah? Well, there are hallucinations, as they say,
Xandon Frogget 40:37
even developers have hallucinations. Yeah,
John Newhoff 40:39
we already.
Xandon Frogget 40:42
I right. We just yeah, oh, Joe does that. Yeah. We’re going to start passing all the code to Joe. That was one of the actually cool things that they made. Really shared how important it was was to give 15 minutes for Q and A at the end of every session, so that everybody gets an opportunity to ask the questions. And then they were really focused on making sure that they had AV staff on hand to be able to get that audio into the recordings for right when you watch them later, see for the Q A, because that’s where you get some really great insight and knowledge, and questions are answered in a different technical sense than you get during the presentation 15. It was, it was great, like, I know that in the past at Dev cons and stuff Q and A section was like, sometimes just never happened. And so it was really cool, actually, really made sure that, as a presenter, we gave time for that, and I filled up my 15 minutes with some really good
John Newhoff 41:35
questions. Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah.
Dan Smiley 41:38
So last year, they spent a lot of time talking about studio. That
41:43
still
Dan Smiley 41:44
a thing,
John Newhoff 41:47
yeah, yeah, except a little different. There were a number of sessions, both by Claris and by some non Claris people you know, Claris recently made the announcement that that the platform has changed a little bit, and that Claire studio and Claire’s Connect are are, you know, built in, so to speak, that our annual, you know that your your annual license includes a level of access to studio and and connect at no extra charge. So they had a number of sessions that were looking at end to end integrations, you know, Claire studio, clarisconnect, Clarisse, FileMaker, and ways that you are working with the whole platform. So studio definitely had a presence. You know, studio and studio still has some obvious limitations, but I was impressed by I was in one session where somebody was showing, I think it was yours, artists from click works. They’re a Belgian company. He was showing a, actually, that was during keynote. I think he was showing a rather complex, clear studio implementation that they had done, or that they’d helped the the county, I’m not sure I’m using the right term, but county of Antwerp Belgium to implement a a think it was an app for helping to place orphaned animals. And that was a clear studio, but also tightly integrated with the file maker back end. And so they, yeah, there is a number of sessions showing, showing those kinds of projects, showing how you integrate FileMaker and Claris. Because, you know, I mean Claire studio, they both have separate databases. Claire studio has its database, FileMaker has its database, and so those integrations require some awareness of how you are moving data back and forth. And so there were a number of sessions on that.
Dan Smiley 43:46
Well, back to the keynote. Did they talked about studio in the keynote? Did anything else jump out at you guys at the keynote? Anything that you can share that’s not under your NDA,
John Newhoff 43:55
I don’t even know if we’re under under NDA, I’m kind of embarrassed about that. Certainly, they showed a number of new features in the next version of FileMaker, which were AI related. And then, you know, I appreciated an approach they took to the keynote that I haven’t seen in the past, which is, they brought a number of people on for brief periods, you know. So they brought yours from click works in Belgium on for his, his little showing of Clara studio only lasted a few minutes, and they brought, remember who else Chris applied, goodness, some people, some internal people within Clara. So it was, yeah, Ronnie really had a short section on, I’m sure he was showing something ai, ai related. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Xandon Frogget 44:45
He did, yeah. Did full circle. And this is stuff that he’s been, he’s been demoing a different but beyond session even, I think we had him, yeah, but he’s, he’s really polished it up. And it’s really, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty cool. That
John Newhoff 44:57
was, I liked that. That. The keynote felt kind of fast paced, with different people coming through and talking about different things. I’m trying to think of anything else
Dan Smiley 45:08
that stood out more apple esque, more like an apple? Yeah.
John Newhoff 45:12
Maybe that’s true, yeah. And certainly I appreciate seeing Claris has been doubling down on the Apple connection for a while, but it’s nice to see, you know, Claris and Apple company all over the place. I think, you know, being closer to Apple and their marketing and everything probably helps, helps us all. Yeah.
Xandon Frogget 45:34
So yeah. And then on the AI front we, I think Apple’s very tight lipped. I They, nobody’s talked about their new AI like, there’s no you don’t have access to it. It’s not really there yet. So it’s hard to tell how they’re going to enter that AI game. Everybody else is kind of moving forward with it. So the expectation and hope is that Apple’s going to come out with something really cool AI wise but, but until we see it, it’s yeah, it’s hard to be able to figure out how well that’s gonna that’s a mystery. It’s yeah, it’s a mystery. And, like, Doesn’t anybody like? They’re, you know, Apple they’re, nobody’s gonna know, No, nobody’s gonna know until the until they’re ready to drop it. They’re, you know, it’s not like, like, a week before you might get developer access, but, but they’re really strict about controlling what they’re doing and getting it out before it’s it’s time. So
Dan Smiley 46:27
well, they’ve got a long history of maybe not being first, but when they get there, being best. So well, we’ve been going an hour. That’s just we should probably start to look to wrap it up. Any final questions you guys have for our engage attendees?
Mike Ross 46:49
Anybody? Yes, yes. Did they announce where they’re going to hold next year’s conference? Not that I heard.
John Newhoff 46:57
Did you know?
Xandon Frogget 46:58
But I did what I did. I almost forgot 40 years. FileMaker has been around for 40 years. And I don’t know if that, yeah, that date is, if that’s for the next one, or if that’s your 40 years. That’s crazy. Celebrated
47:09
40 this year, yeah,
John Newhoff 47:12
yeah. That was, that was a bit of a buzz in the in the keynote that I forgot about. And, yeah, that’s a long time in the tech forum. It is a statistic that I used to poo poo a little bit, but that I I’ve come around to thinking is kind of impressive. You know, every year they talk about how many profitable quarters file makers had as a company, and they’re at 104 now, 104 consecutive profitable quarters as a as a technology company, especially when you consider some of the, some of the companies out there that are venture capital funded, that have never had a profitable quarter, so there’s a I think, that does speak to some staying power for them in the marketplace. So that always interesting to see that you
Dan Smiley 47:56
bet you can’t buy stock just in Claris, rather than having to buy Apple stock,
John Newhoff 48:01
unlike Apple stock, and that way you get 1/100 of a percent of
Dan Smiley 48:12
okay, well, this has been great. I’m glad you guys had a good experience at engage. I look forward to watching brand or xanden presentation, if I can, you know, as a non attendee, if I can get access to it, we’re
John Newhoff 48:26
going to, we’re going to re record that and stick it on our YouTube channel. So, oh, sure, you’ll have access to that. Okay,
Dan Smiley 48:32
perfect. Alright, guys, enjoy, enjoy Austin and and what, what little time you have left down there, and the rest of you all get back to work, do something good
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