There’s a perfect irony in traveling thousands of miles to attend a conference about technology that can make travel obsolete. Video calls beam our faces across continents, AI assistants answer questions faster than any human, and collaboration tools that allow seamless handoffs. Yet Todd Geist and I boarded actual planes to sit in actual chairs next to actual people in Antwerp, Belgium. Thank goodness we did.
Antwerp has been a hub of international trade and human connection for centuries. The medieval guild halls throughout the city suggest early craftspeople understood something we keep forgetting: knowledge transfer happens best when people occupy the same physical space, preferably over good food and better beer.
EngageU, the annual FileMaker conference expertly organized by Clickworks and Square Moon, draws hundreds of primarily European developers each year. It’s a three-day extravaganza of technical sessions, keynotes, vendor booths, and the sort of concentrated learning that leaves your brain pleasantly exhausted. But that’s not really why people come, is it?
The content was excellent. Artificial intelligence dominated the agenda in a way that only genuinely important topics can—not through heavy-handed emphasis, rather by infusing nearly every conversation. How do we integrate large language models? What does Model Context Protocol mean for our workflows? Where’s the line between helpful automation and concerning dependency? Is AI actually, in reality, useful and reliable? These questions keep FileMaker developers awake at night, and EngageU provided a proper forum to wrestle with answers together.
We contributed ProofChat, our recently launched tool for integrating conversational AI into FileMaker solutions. Todd demonstrated how developers can query data, generate insights, and create workflows using natural language—the sort of thing that sounds like magic until you see it work. The audience asked thoughtful questions, several admitted they’d been trying to solve similar problems, and a few shared their own experiments with varying degrees of success.
Here’s the thing about conferences that no amount of technology has managed to capture: the time and space between the official schedule. In a coffee queue, someone casually mentions a workaround that saves you three weeks of headache. A dinner table debate about database architecture somehow evolves into shared stories about complicated clients. Vendor booth chats turns into impromptu consulting session. A fellow developer becomes a friend, then a collaborator, then someone you’ll call when you’re genuinely stuck on something two years from now.
These aren’t accidental opportunities. They’re the real reason we travel.
Todd and I left Belgium with new ideas about AI implementation. More importantly, we strengthened relationships, renewed enthusiasm, and nurtured the kind of professional community that sustains momentum. ProofChat will help developers build better solutions, yet developers themselves—their generosity, curiosity, and willingness to share both successes and failures— made the trip worthwhile.
Artificial intelligence will continue advancing at a dizzying pace. The tools we build with or for AI will grow more powerful, our workflows more efficient, our capabilities more impressive. The real breakthroughs will still happen the old-fashioned way: people in a room, sharing what they know, learning from one another, building something together that none could have managed alone. Just as they did in Antwerp, we will hopefully do again next year, traveling thousands of miles for connections that no amount of technology can quite replace.