Engage 2025 is in the books. We are home, we have rested, and some of us are fighting some kind of bug that was graciously shared at the conference. 🙂
I’m so thankful that Claris is continuing with Engage, and it seems to be only on the upswing. Where Engage 2024 felt like an experiment – a testing of the waters to see if they could continue something like DevCon – Engage 2025 felt like a solid event. Some of last year’s wrinkles were ironed out, and there was a ton of great content. (Honestly, enough content that the conference should have had an extra day.)
Speaking with some folks at Claris, it sounds like Engage is again A Thing We Do Every Year, hopefully even bigger and better in 2026.
The Engage Community
As ever, the biggest benefit of the conference is the people: getting to see coworkers who work remotely and getting to see everybody in the community. Claris recognized this and made improvements over 2024 to facilitate gathering: more parties! Having Claris actually host the opening evening meal gave us an opportunity to all be in the same place at the same time, so you could find who you needed to connect with and meet new folks. Hosting the closing gathering was another improvement. I am a creature of habit, so of course, I miss the actual closing session where we get a recap of the week, a video, and a reveal of next year‘s plans. Perhaps baby steps are OK here, though.
AI Confessional
What I’ll take away from the content was a little surprising to me. Confessional time: I haven’t yet become a believer that the future has to be AI. I’m not super excited about the environmental impact, and to be honest, some of what we’ve seen in the past didn’t seem like it was solving real problems. I haven’t had a huge use for semantic search, for example, but I am excited about what is coming down the pipeline. The AI content this year has me more excited that the capabilities in store will be more directly applicable to our work and to my clients’ solutions. As for the rest of my team members, they’ve been eagerly learning about AI for years and have been putting together offerings and services to help our clients use the technology safely. For example, Wim Decorte wrote this thoughtful blog post about launching secure AI via a local LLM. If you’d like strategy and implementation support in developing your local private secure LLM, contact us.
Energy & Vibes
I’m honestly even more excited by just the vibe at Claris. The staff is excited, Ryan McCann has energy and speaks frankly and genuinely, and the whole crew is leaning into forward motion with enthusiasm. That is ultimately one of the things I look for the most, as someone whose livelihood is linked to the success of Claris. They are stoked, and thus I am stoked.
My Favorite Sessions
I am biased because Steve Lane is just one of the best people I know, but even setting that aside his was my favorite session of the week. The topic sounds solely technical: how to use AI to convert a blob of text you might scrape from Ebay into structured data in your database. But he presented with humanity and humor and wit and elegance, just like the absolute freaking professional he is. The true takeaway was that AI will always be making a best guess and will always need human verification if you are going to count on what it is producing. That pragmatism isn’t part of most of the conversations around AI, and I value the real-life implications Steve tackled. He also included a custom function he wrote using the principle of entropy to programmatically verify the likelihood that AI-produced data is OK because of course he did.
Running the Foundations Training Day with Martha Zink is always a highlight for me. This year was no exception! We had a great group of folks in our class, some who had just started with FileMaker and some who had been working in FileMaker for decades but hadn’t had the opportunity to take a class before. The true embodiment of “never stop learning.”
Ultimately, Engage 2025 did precisely what I hope a conference will do: offer connection, news, ideas, and enthusiasm. Mission accomplished.
Read a recap of Claris Engage 2025 directly from the Claris team here.
