Pausing in Portland: a FileMaker movement
Pause On Error is a FileMaker unconference that is quickly becoming a FileMaker movement. What is an unconference? According to Wikipedia, “an unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term ‘unconference’ has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.”
During the summer of 2009, three top names in the FileMaker community, Andy Gaunt (FMPug), John Sindelar (SeedCode), and Ernest Koe (Proof), thought it might be cool to gather a bunch of FileMaker minds together in a hotel with one goal: share. The idea was to share ideas, techniques, and best practices around all things FileMaker. There would be no commercial advantages, no booths, no ads, and most importantly, no registration fee for anyone who wanted to attend. Sounds like an unconference!
With no budget to speak of, they turned to the free side of the web and social networking giants like Twitter and Facebook, along with free event planning resources, to handle what little organization they would actually need. In a recent interview with Ernest Koe and John Sindelar, Koe explained that at a minimum they just needed to pick a time and place. And so they did. The first Pause On Error unconference was scheduled for July 16 and 17, 2009 at the Ace Hotel in New York City. Approximately 60 or 70 people from around the country crammed into attendees’ suites to speak, listen, and share. It was a smashing success and word spread around the FileMaker community with lightning speed. After the dust settled in New York, Molly Connolly (Thorsen Consulting) joined the original three and formed the Pause On Error steering committee. They soon set their sights on the west coast.
Pause II was held at the Ace Hotel in Portland, OR on January 21 and 22, 2010. How could this sophomore effort prove to be better than its predecessor? Koe explained that Portland had the benefit of following New York’s template. Sindelar chimed in that there were a lot of philosophical questions being asked before New York. Those questions had answers by the time Portland was being planned. Having a baseline from which to work made planning quite a bit easier. Also the dates were announced with more advanced notice for anyone planning to travel.
I was fortunate to attend the first day of Pause On Error and was blown away by the high level of enthusiasm, collaboration, and content. Over one hundred people descended on the Ace in Portland and to the dismay of the steering committee, they had to cut off registration a few weeks before the event in fear of overcrowding the accommodations. The hotel was at capacity and some late registrants had to stay elsewhere. Sessions were held in four suites on the fourth floor. In the more popular sessions, seating on couches and chairs went fast, but attendees found whatever space they could, including the bathrooms and the beds. In the grass roots spirit of Pause On Error, sessions were geared more toward discussion and less toward a one-way dissemination of information. Presenters simply planted seeds and then opened up the floor and let the attendees guide the conversations.
In the evenings, without any kind of official events planned, attendees formed ad hoc social groups and explored the neighborhood in search of local cuisine, or simply gathered for continued conversation at the hotel’s pub and coffee shop. The night before Pause, I found myself with a seemingly random crew of eight developers from around the country sampling some fine seafood at a restaurant a block from the hotel. Then after a full day of sessions I spent hours catching up with friends, old and new, at the hotel pub over some fine local brew.
In the true spirit of a grass roots gathering, everyone contributed to the energy of the sessions by donating gear and helping run tech. In New York, the sessions had been streamed using Ustream, the free web broadcasting service. While the audio transmissions were adequate, the video quality was very poor. For Pause in Portland, the steering committee decided to record the sessions in HD with an assortment of borrowed cameras and high quality microphones. Each session had volunteers running the a/v equipment while the presenters recorded their screens. In the weeks following Pause, live video and slides will be merged for a full quality broadcast for anyone to experience. According to Sindelar, Pause is still being broadcasted, just with a little delay.
I attended two sessions about testing and development practices with Gerald Chang and Vince Mennano (Beezwax). While the sessions weren’t connected, there was some overlap in content. Gerald focused his session on the development and testing environment at his company where he’s an in-house developer. Vince expanded on the idea of development environments with a review of upgrade deployment options and an overview of some migration techniques that he has been working on.
In the afternoon I attended a packed session by Kirk Bowman (Mighty Data) on value pricing. The dialog was very lively as Kirk laid out the basis for Mighty Data’s migration from hourly billing to value pricing. It was obvious that the community is very interested in finding out more about this fresh approach to pricing projects. So obvious that the only free space I could find to sit during the talk was in the bathroom with six or seven other folks trying to squeeze in!
Jason Young (Mighty Data) presented his findings from some recent performance testing that he’s been doing to found out the fastest ways to set and get values from across large data sets. Did you know that looping through records is significantly faster on a layout set to form view, and that table view is significantly slower than both list and form? Another fascinating insight from Jason’s presentation had to do with getting data. When using a script, building a list of values from a field across a large found set is faster when navigating to each record in a loop and setting a field, as opposed to using a function like Get Nth Record. But as Jason pointed out, the List function (when applicable) still rules for getting data when it comes to performance!
Finally, my day ended in a session with discussion facilitated by John Sindelar (Seed Code) that focused on the FileMaker development community itself. It was obvious what was important to this segment of the community: we need to unify and become much stronger from a “big picture” perspective and not get hung up on the little things. We need standards, big picture conceptual standards, not more arguments over naming conventions. This end-of-day session was packed and encompassed all that I believe Pause On Error is growing to represent. It is a movement that is helping a community of developers find its way organically through enthusiasm, through the collaboration of people willing to volunteer time and resources to contribute to a higher cause, and through and extremely talented pool of resources that can bring a high level of content to the table so we all can become smarter and better at what we do.
I asked Ernest and John about the future. I asked them what is next for Pause On Error. Fortunately for the FileMaker community the answer wasn’t “nothing”. But we’ll have to wait for the dust to settle over Portland before we get to pause our day-to-day lives and book the next plane ticket. My advice is to get in early because it’s not going to get any easier to land the coveted spot on the couch at Pause III.
- Jason Mundok (IT Solutions)
