This year’s FileMaker DevCon was a blast. Our booth was often packed 3 and 4 deep with people trying to catch the latest on FMPerception. We delivered over 10 hours of presentations, training and vendor sessions. We won our third FBA Excellence Award in 4 years. Coming on the heels of our promotion to Platinum FBA Partner, I couldn’t be more thrilled with how DevCon went.

FBA Excellence Award

Way way back in 2014, Jeremy Bante and Geist Interactive won Commerical Product of the Year for Barcode Creator. In 2015, we were recognized with an FBA Excellence Award for Development for our role in creation and documentation of the Selector Connector graph pattern. This year we won for FBA Excellence Award for Advocacy, for our work in evangelizing and advocating for the powerful new FileMaker Platform.

We think a strong vibrant community is essential to the success of any platform, FileMaker included. We make contributing to the community a core part of our strategy. The FBA Awards are a way to recognize the efforts of individuals and companies all across our ecosystem for their contributions to the platform.  This year’s group of winners was excellent and we are proud to be among them.

Presentations

Dave Graham, our VP of Services, gave a presentation titled “Data Modeling that Scales”.  Even though it was his first ever DevCon presentation, he looked like an old pro up there. He kept The packed house glued to the screen as he walkd everyone through using the Party Model to model Contacts and their myriad relationships.

Training

I gave an 8 hours training on the latest new stuff in FileMaker centered around web integration. It was a huge topic and we covered a lot of ground; everything from cURL and JSON to building APIs with node.js.  By the end of the day, we had a room full of people, many of whom had never opened a text editor or a terminal, building a node.js HTTP API connected to FileMaker.

I’ll be giving that training again in one form or another very soon. If you are interested in finding out about that signup to get notified when the dates are set.

We also gave a sort of a preview of our new starting kit, called Karbon. Karbon is for building ambitious FileMaker custom applications. It uses modern software design principles to bring a level of scalability, modularity, and robustness, that is difficult to achieve otherwise. We’ll have more information about that very very soon.

Product Expo

Our booth was busy all the time, even during the in between time. Barcode Creator is always a hit, and FMPerception was on pretty much 24/7 at the booth. Dave Ramsey has developed quite a following as the guru of all things database analysis related. He was a non-stop FMPerception presenting machine.

This DevCon marks one year since FMPerception was first released. The response has been awesome. We have tried to reward such phenomenal support by releasing 33 new versions in the first year. We don’t plan on slowing down in year two either.

Biggest DevCon Ever

1600 people from all over the globe attended DevCon this year. That’s a new record. Clearly, I am not the only one who thought that FileMaker 16 was the biggest release since 7. It was great to see such a large crowd. The future of the FileMaker is bright indeed.

Thanks to everyone who came to visit us at our booth, or came to one of our sessions. You are the reason we go to DevCon.