FileMaker DevCon 2018 (Wednesday): Bring On the Attendee Party

Ouch…we have all reached the part of DevCon where our feet hurt a little more, where our lower backs ache a little more and the lack of sleep starts to catch up with us all. Hang in there everyone — lets power our way through the last day together.

Rolling on…Wednesday was the second full day of sessions. From learning about how FileMaker and Tableau can play nice together in the morning to hearing how one can get the most out syncing with mobile devices in the afternoon — there was a session for everyone today.

“Live” from Tech Support Central

After a quick breakfast, I spent the morning and afternoon in Tech Support Central again. As you can imagine, Tech Support Central is a place we hope you NEVER have to visit but we also realize that no product is perfect and that you will, on occasion, run into an issue or problem. As the FileMaker platform continues to evolve, the systems and technologies you can integrate with also continue to evolve and grow. Because of this the days of saying, “just reboot and everything will be fine” are going the way of support for Instant Web Publishing, 32-bit plug-ins, and the Classic theme.

Nevertheless, to try and help as many attendees as possible as efficiently as possible we did a few things different this year.

Dipping into other departments — this year we were lucky enough to have members of our quality assurance team help out in the booth. Not only did they provide additional help but they added a level of product expertise that we have not had in the past. And, their experience helping customers and seeing what they are doing with the product will be valuable to take back to the “Wedge” and share with others on their team. So a special THANK YOU to Masao, Kenji, James, Tony and Nicolas for helping out this year — we hope this is the first year of many that you will be able to participate in DevCon.

On the topic of keeping track of who comes to visit the booth — we also used a different method of tracking cases this year. We do this to see if we can determine trends in what attendees are coming to see us about. If we get a lot of attendees asking about the same issue, we know there is a problem and do what we can to address it, either by way of documentation or actually addressing the issue in a future update. Tracking the visits also allow us to follow up on issues if necessary or to alert those who reported issues that they have been addressed.

Thanks for being patient as we try and help everyone who comes to see us.

Tech Support Central is scheduled to have abbreviated hours on Thursday so if you have an issue or want to discuss a bug — come visit the booth as early as you can.

CASE (DANCE::STEP = “RIGHT”; “CROSS LEFT BEHIND RIGHT”; “CROSS LEFT IN FRONT OF RIGHT”)

Lots going on at the Attendee Patty in the Tate Ballroom ballroom Wednesday night. Aa usual it was a great time.

There were plenty of oversized (dare I say Texas sized) games this year, including chess, Battleship and cornhole to name a few

…as well as soccer ball billiards — which very easily could have gotten out of hand for the over-zealous amongst us.

…and while you could argue that “FileMaker” is not a legal play in Giant Scrabble — if it were allowed it should easily be worth about a bagillion points in this bloggers mind.

The band tonight kept the night rolling along while attendees got their line dancin’ on.

Even though I came up a little short in a game of darts with a friend, it was a fun night and it is always great to see the attendees having a good time and relaxing after a couple of days of script triggers, web viewers, JSON arrays, and recursive calculations.

THURSDAY HIGHLIGHTS

Tomorrow (Thursday) is the last day of the conference. However, there is plenty going on including:

• The Closing Sessionis tonight at 5:30–6:30PM in the Tate Ballroom. We will wrap up the weeks events and present some well deserved awards to community members and recognize technical excellence, innovation, and achievement in FileMaker custom app development. Oh…and we might reveal where DevCon 2019 might be. I’m not telling.
• Because our FileMaker Business Alliance partners have special interests that are not always met by the general conference program, Thursday is FBA Dayand provides a chance for FBA partners to attend sessions targeted to them.
• And we do not want to overlook our customer’s either so Thursday is also Customer Dayand will include several FileMaker in Action sessions that highlight business leaders and citizen developers telling their FileMaker success stories.

Tomorrow I am likely going to hang out in the Product Showcase a bit and check out some of the “cool” stuff the exhibitors are demoing. So, between that, the goings on at the Closing Session and some final acknowledgments, I am sure I have one more blog post in me. Thanks for hanging with me throughout the week.