Gladly Would He Teach, and Gladly Learn
I believe there is a fundamental question about how learning is going to have to be acquired in the future for the FileMaker community. This is both a conceptual and an economic question. There are a lot of misimpressions about future learning in the FileMaker community; likewise, there is also a huge amount of self–denial. Some of these unreasonable expectations stem from the cultural background and history of the community: in the early days it was largely a self-help, help-others approach. People learned their way into FileMaker. Those days are long since gone; a systematic approach to learning how to use these products and how they work together is needed.
Intermediate level and above FileMaker information has real economic
value, and that value is going to have to be recognized. Now there are
any number of people in various parts of the FileMaker community who
have deep, fundamental knowledge about one (occasionally more) of the
FileMaker products. These folks can—if they choose to do so—provide
assistance and answer questions on various forums. There are
significantly many fewer persons who have that same level of deep,
fundamental knowledge about the broad family of products and of how
they work together and should be deployed. Integration versus silos.
There are also a number of people who classify their level of
understanding and expertise far above where it actually lies and thus
presumably believe that they do not need on-going training. Inherent in
this is, of course, the age-old problem of not knowing what one does
not know. For example—in another forum—a person self-classified as
having “intermediate” level of expertise was asking recently how to
clone a file.
So what is the novice to do to get the knowledge to become a
competent developer? What is the experienced intermediate developer to
do to become soundly proficient in the overall FileMaker environment?
First, the days of self-learning for the novice are largely past in
my view. Professional training about these products is essential if
you’re serious about them. Developers need to learn this; so does
FileMaker, Inc. There are certified trainers who offer a variety of
introductory and lower-intermediate level courses. See the information
and listings at http://www.filemaker.com/support/training.html.
High-intermediate and true advanced level training and above is much
more difficult to acquire. Several of us are contemplating some ideas
to deal with that.
Second, there are a number of good books and a number of good videos
that are useful for introductory and intermediate level developers.
Unfortunately there are also some bad ones as well. Sorting them out
isn’t easy. In my view the bad ones outnumber the good ones.
Third, there are all the various FileMaker oriented lists and
forums, whose record is decidedly mixed. Part of the reason for that is
that if you don’t understand something or know how to do it, asking the
right question in the right way can be difficult. When asking a
question it is a very good idea to frame that question in such a
fashion that it stands a good chance of getting an answer. Stating the
objective is an important, and often overlooked, part of a “…how do I…”
question. Questions about unexpected behaviors are a little different.
Information about what was observed and the background environment is
often sketchy. These elements need to be more fully detailed. And all
questions as a general rule should include version of the product and
version of the operating system.
Much of the expertise provided to answer questions that arise in the
FileMaker community has real economic value. Much of that economic
value is—in effect—donated to the community by those who have it. The
economic self and the civic self stand in equipoise. A major question
is how much longer that tension–filled balance can continue as the
products become increasingly complex and as the entrance point of base
level competence rises.
The professional reputation of the professional developer community
rests on a dramatic increase in skill levels. This is particularly true
for the independent developer. Likewise, the effective reputation and
reliability of the FileMaker family of products rests on the skills of
the professional developer. The increasing power conveyed by the
ever–richer feature sets and functionalities of new versions offers
great opportunity and concomitant great challenge. A deep and
fundamental understanding of how all the FileMaker products work and
how they can and must be crafted together is the best response the
professional developer can provide. By acquiring that level of
understanding we both claim the possibilities that FileMaker provides
and validate the company’s decision to provide that increased power.
Steven H. Blackwell
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9 Responses to “Gladly Would He Teach, and Gladly Learn”
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Well said! I’d say more but the only thing I can see that Steven left out are his personal favorite resources. I’ll throw out FMForums.Com as my favorite.
“Unskilled and Unaware of It” covers the phenomenom of self-inflated perception in all its social psychological glory. I tend to doubt there is much anyone can do to combat this. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
I have noticed over the past six years that while the FileMaker family of products have grown significantly, the expectations for product mastery have not grown in similar stead. The “legendary ease of use” still exists, but only in the sense that it is still easy to create solutions that conform to the capabilities of the 2.1 product. What many productivity users and some in Santa Clara have failed to notice is that as the products expanded both in number and in scope, the required learning for mastery has grown in accord.
FileMaker Pro is no longer the sole purview of the domain expert; it is no longer simply a productivity tool. I believe there is a duality to the product with which many are uncomfortable. While it is very easy for the novice to acquire the skills to use FMP much as a novice would use Word, mastery of the tools not only takes longer, but I would argue is inaccessible to some. A decade ago having five years experience with FMP would qualify someone as being an advanced user. Today, fifteen years experience says little to nothing about the skill level of a user or developer. FileMaker 8 brings the product closer than ever to an application development environment, and to be successful in building an application with it requires having a very broad understanding of the product at a very deep level of detail.
What is of primary interest to me is this new partitioning of developers, largely a reclassification of previously “advanced” developers as intermediate and intermediate as novice. I believe that for the product to be successful FMI will need to attract and retain a new “advanced” class of developers to boost credibility of the product line and to provide the training necessary to ensure continued viability and entrenchment of the product. To date I have not seen any tangible attempt to do so and that worries me.
I agree that the sea change from 6 to 7/8 has indeed moved us out of the realm where the inhouse general IT cook and bottle-washer can, in their spare time, properly build a Filemaker system,; but I also think FMI has not been clear about this change in their PR. While that may be good for one side of our revenue streams (’We built this, but it don’t work so good; can you fix it?’), it also makes Filemaker a harder sell to the enterprise.
And I fear that failure, which may represent an internal schism, poses a sort of viral infection risk for the future– an unresolved tension that could prove fatal if, by trying to sell to both Jean the shop owner and to the Events department for the City of Boston, they end up selling to neither. The higher level of education needed for 8 should exclude Jean, in my view.
Pretty strong words … “the days of
self-learning for the novice are largely past”
If FileMaker would just stick to its roots. The FileMaker Pro Tour video tag line is still “Go ahead, Be creative, No training wheels required”
All of my clients are self taught, non-technical people, and have done some amazing stuff
FileMaker was meant for humans, not geeks
I just saw this ‘For Sale’ post on craigslist:
“FileMaker Pro 7 & 8 + training (for Mac) – $100
“I’m sticking with HyperCard. So you can take advantage of my foray into the mysteries of FileMaker Pro (for Mac OS X). I have original discs and manuals of version 7 & 8 plus training video CD (Virtual Training Company FileMaker Pro 7) and several books and magazines. Well over $400 worth of software. Yours for $100.00. Call xxx”
Mr. Durniak says:
Pretty strong words … “the days of
self-learning for the novice are largely past”
Maybe so; however I believe them to be accurate.
Sticking to roots may mean abandoning paths to growth. FMI has not stuck to roots. It has expanded and grown since January of 1998. And that growth has come largely in areas where it was not present before then.
“All of my clients are self taught, non-technical people, and have done some amazing stuff….
FileMaker was meant for humans, not geeks.”
This confuses non–technical with non–trained. There are some amazing solutions out there developed by people whose principal job is not as a full–time, professional developer. But then, many times, in a single blinding moment, these can fail spectacularly because the non–trained individual didn’t know about or didn’t enforce—for example—referential integrity or record–locking or prescriptive security measures.
The future of the products depends on having a skilled development community, whether independent developers or in–house ones.
Steven H. Blackwell
I’m reading Stephen’s comments with a mixture of dismay and understdanding. Having started in v2.1 many years ago I have been trying to keep up with the theoretical and technical development of the products while also trying to maintain a process to support business development inside a large company. It isn’t easy.
We have a big IT department that cannot figure out how to provide services to my client group. We have a series of political problems that have slowed down my ability to migrate/upgade the software base past version 6. I have a mental bandwidth limit that is stretched thin trying to manage both the technical development and the money/political process to keep a vital system alive inside my department.
I think the key to success has been and will continue to be making connections between technology solutions like FileMaker and business problems like managing a group of professionals in a production environment. My ability as a design professional (Architect by training) to understand process as well as outcomes fits very well with the development environment that FMP has taken great pains to maintian through the life of their products. Having said that I do need to upgrade my skills by training as Stephen suggests.
The great weakness that afflicts large organizations is the blindness that technical people have towards business process and the reciprocal distain that professionals have for “geeks” who can’t seem to get past their own limited worldview. Bridging that gap is a key value for any business and something that I have been able to do using FMP.
We need to keep the doors wide open to the novice business person who adopts FileMaker as a survival tool. These people tend to be the creative synthetic types that can put things together and make a go of it. I would hope that FileMaker Inc. would develop more support for this type of entry level developer while the rest of the experts do what you have been doing so well for so long namely keep the seminars and training sessions elevated to push the limits. We need that too.
Profit is not a dirty word. Charging money for expertise is fine. Keeping a good list of oppertunities would be my challenge.
thanks experts, you rock!
George Hutchinson
The whole of database development can be summed up in the simple phrase, “solve the problem.” I was a plant manager in a multi-million dollar prepress catalog firm in Connecticut fatigued from the daunting task of chasing pages in a 50,000 sq. ft. facility. Along with my plight dealing with this massive cluster of fun, my first exposure to a computer (one of those IBM PC beasts’s gifted to us dos idiots in the early 80’s) left me with the unmistakable belief that I was a helpless moron.
I discovered the Mac with Microsoft Excel, and then came FileMaker Pro 2.1. I let my supervisory staff deal with the aches and pains of page-chasing while I spent the next five months writing my first database (as if I knew what I was getting into.) Apple Computer actually came to do a marketing video on our Mac-solution company, as we were the alleged champions of the Workgroup Server (brawn and brains) and had plenty of Quadras supplying documents to our imagesetters, But the film crew was particularly interested with our Claris solution, FileMaker Pro. As we implemented this flat file – look-up dependent solution, I declared my position as plant manager obsolete, which it surely was.
What was more important than the technology itself (although I still am grateful for that defining moment) was the fact that sound thinking stands behind and substantiates any database solution. Any logic can produce an answer, but only right logic produces right answers.
My point here is that while FileMaker is accessible to those who can write simple and even complex calculations, do tricks with the interface, and dazzle the impressionable, the solutions to problems far exceed the ease of use. Anyone can make the logical claim that apples = oranges. It remains untrue unless, of course, one postulates that both are fruit and that fruit is all the same, given its class. Data modeling and problems that face real business are like this. Answers to these kinds of questions are matters of clarification and priority.
I am still in management and am by no means an expert developer, although I have been using FileMaker every day since that auspicious event in the early 90s. I will say however, that this discussion is a worthy one and I would only hope that we ( I say “we” with great reluctance) in the development community embrace the idea that our job is not to provide information, as in “the latest dataset.” But instead, we must continue to “solve the problem.” The task of trying to persuade a group of executives to state what they really mean, what is right and correct for their enterprise, is arduous at best. Most haven’t the slightest clue of what it means to land on two feet, as they are terrific dancers.
FileMaker has, to their good fortune, proverbially graduated from college, gaining some respect in the business community and, even within the phyla of IT professionals. But it still doesn’t solve problems unless those who are developing solutions know that there is even a problem that needs to be solved. It is very much like that Aristotelian axiom, “Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.” When will we ever quit bothering with technique and begin thinking in earnest about the larger issues? We are still left with the task of herding cats!
Donald Kleinschmidt
Just a quick note from my corner to thank everyone for the tremendous quality of these comments. Hope to see you all at Devcon 2006.
Ernest Koe, BoB