Day two was a whirlwind of sessions, food, and people. There was much to take in and much to digest. It is a good thing I took a lot of notes. I’ll need more time to process all that has happened.
The morning started with a great breakfast and a session on FileMaker Champions. There we learned about FileMaker’s program to collaborate with its developers out there to spread the word about the FileMaker platform. We at Soliant are a FileMaker Champion. I may sign up as well.
A general session was then presented on an upcoming component of the FileMaker platform. As with the keynote, the session is confidential at this time. But suffice it to say, there’s a game-changer coming down the pipe soon.
I attended a great session on design: Introduction to the Design Process by Alexis Allen, founder of the blog www.designingfilemaker.com. The session focused on how to design screens and entire custom apps to make the end-user’s experience more efficient. I am always trying to improve my design work, so I took a lot away from her session. Specifically some things I had forgotten: If your UI needs to be explained, then it is not efficient, pick no more than three colors for your theme, and keep your font choices to one or two. If you go with two, then pick contrasting fonts, not similar ones. I invented a hashtag from what she said: #fontnerds. She’s one of those.
The afternoon session by Todd Geist called “Javascript is Eating the World” was paced faster than a tornado in Kansas. This was the session that challenged me. It was completely impossible to take good notes on this as he was doing a lot of coding. I think he built a server on his desktop and built an app that was on that server that reached out to a FileMaker database and returned the data in a browser. It was incredible. I’ll be putting the video recording of this session on 0.5 speed to try to follow it all.
One of the biggest quandaries DevCon attendees face is choosing which session to attend at a given time. I’ve seen people standing forlornly in the hallways looking at their DevCon2Go app on their phone trying to decide between two favorite sessions. Luckily, the sessions are recorded, but being live in the session has its value.
I wavered between Security and the Cloud by Rosemary Tietge of FileMaker Inc, and FileMaker Go and iOS apps: One-Step Integration by Cristoffer Ippolite. Although I continue to need to know about security, I chose the latter session because of its appeal to me as a developer who wants to integrate with other apps. The session, again, was mind-numbing, in a good way. Cristoffer spoke of how to send data from FileMaker to another app, wait, and get something back from the app. He had an impressive demo file. The class was almost above me, but I think I’ll be able to comprehend it faster.
During the day I continued to say hi to folks. I checked in with the Developer Challenge group that I met last night. They were doing fine. I talked with one of them about this first DevCon experience for him. I hung out with Soliant folks again. And I was able to sit and chat with a FileMaker Product Manager last night as he was finishing up dinner. See that’s what you do: say hi to everyone. Great rewards will come your way!
Now its time for sleep. A long day of more deep-learning sessions are on their way. I wish my colleague Makah well on her class. I look forward to hearing what she has to say.
Oh and a very important event happened yesterday: I got my FileMaker 15 certification ribbon. That was the missing piece to my name card!
I look forward to day three.
