navarre.aiClarisTalk AI · the FileMaker AI podcast
Reporting from the Vienna Calling FileMaker Conference
Reporting live from the Vienna Calling unconference: five conversations from the only European FileMaker unconference, recorded on the ground in Vienna. Organizer Philipp Puls on why the format works, Charles Delfs on rebranding to Klai and what an actual AI strategy looks like, Johan Hedman on the next big European conference, Vincenzo Menanno on technical debt and using AI to analyze your code, and a turnabout where Javier Durá puts Matt in the hot seat.⏱ CHAPTERS0:00 — Welcome: what is the Vienna Calling unconference0:24 — Philipp Puls (72solutions): inside the unconference format13:50 — Ch
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Transcribed by machine (whisper, large model), 13,208 words. Names and product terms are sometimes misheard; the audio is the record.
Claris Talk AI Reporting live from the Vienna Calling Un-Conference in Vienna, Austria. I sat down with several of the people at the conference and the organizer, Philip, and talking about what this conference is about. Enjoy. Vienna Calling, I'm here with Philip. This is your event, sir. Yes, and a very fun event it is. It is. I really enjoy doing it. I don't know why this is my first time attending, because Vienna is my favorite city in Europe, because classical music. It is. Lots of classical music options here. In the summer, it seems much more touristy. You know, nowadays Vienna is a very touristy place any time. But during the summer, especially in August, we have that open-air film festival on Rathausplatz, where you have operas every evening.
So that might be a time to come next time. It sounds so lovely. This event has been amazing. You pulled 70 people or so this year from all over Europe, some from the U.S. I'm the only one from Greece, which is weird. But it boosts our statistics. Yeah, that one extra checkbox for that one extra country. And I would say it's an un-conference. How would you describe it briefly to the people who need to know about it for next year? An un-conference is a format where we provide a safe space for your ideas, your grievances, your hopes and ideas, and every participant is expected to chip in. Like, it's not a conference to sit in the back and dabble on your Blackberry.
Oh, God, that's how old I am. Anyway, it's a conference that really intends to get you going, like either you present or you have an opinion in the discussion or you show what you've missed last year or whatever. So everybody can chip in their own sessions. The calendar is open. You just pick a room, you pick a time. You might have an idea during lunch with a couple of other participants that you join in. Once there are three people interested in whatever, you can just pick a room and book a time. And maybe five other people will join in. And even if not, you still have a nice place to discuss what you have to discuss with your three people. Yeah, that's one huge difference, right?
It's not a curated thing. You're not. You're just making space available because you know that there's going to be great content. Yeah. And some of it's along the same lines of what you would see at other conferences. My session, for example, was something I've presented on a couple of times before, and I think several of the other ones were as well. Vincenzo Manano on technical debt, a subject that he knows a lot about and cares a lot about and is really important for the community to see. I think those issues are all not just very important, but they are also initiators for the other discussions that go on. So we always need a few of those more or less standard presentations to get people going.
So normally on the first day, it's more or less a one or two track conference. Yeah, but then it spreads out because then the discussions happen in the cafeteria, in the in the bar in the evening, then you decide to make a session the next day. So that's also why we have a three day format, because if you were just warming up on the first rate and leave, it would just be another conference. I was sort of unsure. Like today, the last day when it's supposed to end, just keep we will we will have I planned the closing session today. OK, and we'll have it at midday, which is approximately the same every year. But we can still switch it. We can still move it back or forward as we please.
But the calendar has filled for Saturday now already. And I think people are are good to good to be released into the wild again. I might. This is one of the podcast segments I'm doing, but I want to do some more. So I might actually just put a little segment on there, like come to the spot and we'll do a ten minute podcast episode. I think the the real big difference for Vienna Calling or unconferences in general, but Vienna Calling is the at least only European unconference and FileMaker at this time is that you do not. Get people on stage that you normally see, but you get people on stage who maybe have never spoken at a conference before. There's been a few great ones like that and and those people are gems.
Not everybody is is in his or her setup prepared to speak in front of two hundred and fifty five hundred people. Not everybody wants that pressure, seeks that attendance. But every one of the attendants here brings knowledge, brings their their experiences, their customer stories with them. And I have not seen a single one on the conferences that hasn't at least brought one or two great and amazing stories. Over coffee. And if they are good and amazing for three people, make a session. Yeah, that's always the answer. That's really interesting to make a session out of it. And you don't need a presentation. You just open your laptop, you sit down, you talk. Presenting just means putting your idea forward.
And also the length is something you can pick, right? Like if your idea is half an hour or an hour and ten minutes or whatever. Yeah, yeah. If it if you just want to get something off your chest, you do a 15 minute session. I think that's the smallest that our calendar allows. And I think that makes sense. What are your plans for this conference for next year? We are expecting to be around the same time end of May, beginning of June, as we were historically with not FMP Berlin. The spot is more or less fixed in the calendar for 15 years now. So we intend to keep it because people expect it and might have might have arranged their travel plans for ages now.
Around that, we we hope to gather a comparable crowd. The the unconference format we think is best kept at 100 participants. We don't want to have more 300 or whatever would be no difference. And that's that's. It's intentional because over 100 people, subgroups form and communications start to change. Yeah, yeah. So those subgroups would then always stick together and not intermingle. And that's not that's not the vibe that we engage you conference, which I think is an amazing conference that's different. It's I don't think that happens that way. But I think at an unconference, you're right. I stopped a long time ago. I was involved in hosting pause on air conferences when we were in the Ace Hotel and when the room was full.
And so a couple of people were in the bathtub and sitting on the floor, you know, very uncomfortable. Wouldn't be good, like in your 60s now. But I don't know. Maybe that's not really true because it was just that great. We're all in this together feel exactly and share whatever you have on your mind. This definitely really captures that. Yeah, I think you're right. So keeping it around that size. I also perceive and I'd love to know your opinion on this. This seems to be the most technical of all the conferences. Is that just because Germans are just more technical? No, I think because we attract historically a very technical crowd and the people are are very intentionally focused on being cutting edge and sharing that without showing off.
Yeah, it seems a character trait, but that seems to be a character trait in FileMaker in general, that this sharing and caring for each other, we could be contestants on the same marketplace, but for some really funny reason that might be worth a sociology study, we seem to function differently. We seem to collaborate more and profit more from the collaboration. Yeah, that's great. I don't I'm wondering if that's such a unique thing, but I think in our space there's really not a lot of competition for the same customers. I know that that does happen some, but it's not the rule. Also, there's a lot of people here who are internal developers and therefore very strongly motivated to share and to learn from others who do what they do.
Whereas if it was just, you know, partners or something that, you know, there'd be more of that competition. It might be that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just happy that it is that way. Exactly. It's just not let's not stare a gift horse in the mouth, as it were. Yeah. And we are we need to think now about the size for next year and the rooms for next year and where to be. We might be in the same space. The museum's here is lovely central. I have to kind of describe the place, right? Yeah, please. It's right in the dead center of where the museums are. So across the street from like the Natural History Museum, Art Museum close by is the Albertina, which is one of the best museums in the world.
And also just all the other culture here and the room that we're in, you look out the window and that's your view. You have this unbelievable view of the center of the city. Yeah, it's it's Baroque Vienna right from from your windowsill. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's calm and it's easy to reach. All those are perks that I really like. On the other hand, the rooms are a bit are a bit too conferencey for our taste because with with good bemis here and the seating is very or seems very strict. And I think we could enhance the unconference feeling by a bit of a a more low level venue that gives more of a workspace. I mean, it's it's it's it's it's more of a conference vibe than a conference vibe.
And that might change dynamics again. Yeah. And actually something we'll see where there's like a I don't know, in a hotel, but one of the things that was great about Paws on Air was it was actually in a hotel, so a lot of people could stay there. And so there was a lot more of that. So like my where I'm staying is an Airbnb type place, I don't know, two kilometers away because for room rent pricing. It's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. It's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent.
And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. And so it's like, oh, I'm going to have to pay for the room rent. We don't have to care for your hotel. We don't have to care for your travel plans. And yeah, you also don't have to guarantee by paying, like a lot of other conferences, they have to have their contingent paid for and the safety. We think we're going to have, you know, 70 people. But if we only have 50 of them, we're on the hook to pay for a bunch of hotel rooms.
That's a lot of risk. Exactly. And we're a small team. So we have to mitigate that. And a great team, the four of you. Yes, yes, it's beautiful. It's great. It's great working with all four of them. Stefan, my partner, is in that with me now for 15 years or about. Julia and Emmanuel are very strong, very, very focused and great developers and organizers, we wouldn't be able to do all that without them. I only get to see their organization amazingness so far. Yeah. I just presume they'll also be great developers too. So we are very lucky. It's a good team and we are in the right size where everybody still works on projects and you don't have too much overhead in quality control or that dishing out tasks.
But you get you get to program yourself. You get to you get involved with the customer. So we all enjoy that. Yeah, well, I'm very much looking forward to it next year as we round the last day here. Thanks so much for putting this on. It's awesome. Thank you. It was a pleasure. I'm here with Charles Delps. So you have rebranded your company to Clay. Let's talk about that. Yeah. So this is something that's been actually in the works for quite some time. And with the advancements of A.I. over the past few years, it's something that we've seen the writing on the wall where we're going with a new generation of software and. I mentioned yesterday in one of the talks, the thing that you offer, if you know, as a developer, if we're offering code and that code becomes highly accessible, we don't have a product anymore.
And that is the way I think with every developer, we have to really sort of think the way or change the way we think. So we've been doing the same thing internally. We're thinking, how can we how can we change what our offering is and FM Metaforms has always been a product that has given the developer access to advanced technology without having to learn that technology. And as such, that we we we realize that now we have access. Yeah, every every every developer, not even a developer, every citizen has access to the same technology stack now for the most part. That doesn't mean we don't have a product. So we have to say, well, what what is it that we can offer?
What can we bring? What can we bring to the table that the average vibe coder, which I personally hate that that term, the average vibe coder can can can can use and that is a few things. It is infrastructure is governance, right? And is enterprise grade ability to to host applications like deployment and deployment. Yes. Which is not easy. You know, as someone who's vibe coded, whatever, several different applications. We're talking a little bit about a little bit ago about using Superbase. I set up a starting application with Superbase and it's set up without me intending it. Every table was open to the world, like sort of by default. And then it gives me like a warning of all the things you can fix.
And they can't be fixed by a prompt. I'm like, ah, so that's exactly that's one of the things that that you I actually see some other things you really bring to the table. Well, there's a few there's a there's a few few more. Let me just sort of dig into that a little bit deeper. You know, we were talking had a really interesting discussion the other day with Nicholas Franco. And we talked about, you know, where is what is what is useful. It's a little bit maybe slightly different opinion. But if we want to have an AI strategy for your business, right? It's not just about buying software. It's not that I'm going to buy the latest drive that has AI in it or I'm going to buy the latest product or I'm going to get everybody a subscription to cloud code because that cannot scale.
Right. And you don't want you don't want interfaces that are all always chat based, you know, I see I look at the filmmaker community, for example, and we see people people demonstrating, demonstrating and say, hey, look, I can connect an MCP up to my application. I can I can chat and I can get my sales report. But that sales report is a sales report that I get every week. Why are you generating that? Right. So we see the future as being more what you may want to call semi deterministic or hybrid type apps. Semi deterministic. Yeah. So so if you think about I'm typing a prompt into to to your to your cloud code or GPT of any sort and I'm saying generate me Monday sales report.
Right. That goes it queries a database, it's generating some HTML and it's rendering this report. I don't know if I call that semi deterministic. No, no, that's not that's not that's fully determined. Yeah, well, that's no that's not that's I would I wouldn't say that's deterministic at all because we're relying on the model. OK. But what we really need is that person who's generating that sales report. Let's call them the sales agent. They need the ability to have control to be able to generate that stuff, but not generate it. First of all, they need to be able to generate safely. Right. At an enterprise grade. So that means somebody who's not a technical worker has to have full access to the technical stack.
They don't want to generate that code every single time, every single Monday. Right. That's not practical either. So how do you solve that? Well, you need to be able to give that sales agent access to technology. I need to be able to give the receptionist access so that so that they can go and say, hey, I want to I want to connect all of our company's contacts and send them out an invitation to an event. Right. And build a little app for that. Right. That's a that's a massive security breach in a reasonable sized company that has any type of technical infrastructure. So what we're leaning to solve is to to solve that by bringing access to the technology to that person, but have that in a highly governed and observable manner.
So now they can say, hey, I want to have access to our pipe drive, for example, to gather all of the contacts. I want to have access to notion. I want to create some kind of user interface and I want to send it out through an email. So those are four, one, two, three, four, three or four conduits. Right. Those conduits are not controlled by that same A.I. and that's the fundamental premise of where we're going. Yeah. Bring that access to that level of A.I. integration, A.I. agentic engineering. But I'm not going to say the word engineering in this particular case because that person's not really thinking that way, but that's what's end up happening, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And bring that all the way to the end user. Right. And that's I think where the future of A.I. is going to be for companies who have a true A.I. strategy. Yeah. I think you said something the other day that I really loved about sort of the definition of what an A.I. strategy is. I really like some of the words you had to put it. Yeah. You know, it's I think. I think. If you don't have a strategy, you obviously don't have a strategy. Right. But I don't think it's just throwing A.I. at every single problem and I don't think it's the chat interface. Yeah. So like if you have if you use a chat interface and you throw A.I. at every problem, you don't have any A.I. strategy.
It was I don't know, you put it really poetically, but I can't remember the way you put it. But yeah, I think that's. You know, there's a there's a we're here at Vienna calling and there was a talk yours that you mentioned you showed you showed a number of really simple examples. I think right now, you know, it's such a massively new thing that it's really, really in our faces with everything. But like with any technology, it's going to start to to subside and it's going to fade into the background and it's going to be just part of our fabric woven in here. Yeah. And definitely what I'm what I'm focusing on, like with the free classes they do and stuff like this is to build little things, you know, buttonize it was a theme I was using early on so that they just become part of it, just like all the other functions.
And I think those are the biggest wins and people aren't doing. No, I know they're not. Well, they are starting to like in Europe. I think they're, you know, the polls I've been taking. I think there's actually some things. But but also I think people are doing really big A.I. implementations, which are much harder, much more. I don't know if I'd say brittle, but a lot more high maintenance. There is a vulnerability or fragility, I guess you could say. And then the big ones like we've done, we do consulting as well. And that's actually one of the other things that kind of wanted to get to you. The huge the huge benefit that you bring to your clients at Clay is your great development staff and your personal interact, you know, working with customers and whatnot to make sure that they're getting all of the security and all of the right answers and all of the right technology and all that stuff so that they know that someone doesn't make the pretty big mistakes of vulnerabilities.
I don't know, from my perspective, you bring that to the table big time. Well, you know, we have a lot of experience running infrastructure. Yeah. Right. And running infrastructure, running a software as a service and the consulting side, and that's why our new direction, when we change the company, we said, well, how can we where are we going from here? Right. Where we are old. Our old product, better forms was our it was it was a terrible name. Yeah. And it was really, really was. Yeah, I was. But it started becoming known throughout the community. So people just started calling it better forms. Yeah. Made a little bit better. I don't know. Yeah. And we've totally dropped the FM part.
Now, that doesn't mean FileMaker is not a first class citizen, but it's not the only citizen there. And FileMaker understands this as well, because, you know, half of the presentations I see on FileMaker now are all about integration, right? That is probably a good 60 percent of everything. Integrating with other technologies, other systems. And we see that as well. So, you know, why don't we integrate our platform and our our expertise into that and try to predict, knock on wood, try to predict where our future is going to be with AI? So that's that was the that was the impetus to to change, to change not only the name, but also the direction. So, yeah, this was only a couple of months ago, the change.
Yeah, we I guess we really had about two months ago or so, a month and a half ago. Right. And so it's it's an ongoing process as we as we restructure the process. As other people. Yes. You can always nail the Canadian. Yes, I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still think about is sounds normal to me. It's not a boot and you're going to hear this on the recording as well. It's about that's still a little bit of an accent to it. I should hope so. I need to differentiate somehow. I mean, I know. So, yeah, I'm Pacific Northwest. I have. So we identify a black sense to. I think just going back. So if we could just going back to the small the button, is it sort of strategy?
You know, I think a lot of the developers are only or maybe not even doing that as much as they could be because it's not as exciting. No, it's not. It's five lines and five lines of script and filmmaker, which I think is absolutely incredible because there is no other environment that I know that you could put maybe four or five lines and get that kind of result. Yeah, I kind of go back. Like one of the example I use is the export to PDF script step. And that came in FileMaker with the send mail script step. You know, like the export export PDF in one step could like, you know, set a file and just create it, put data into it, have everything in your pages and create an email and attach it, I'm like, wow, that's you know, that's kind of an example of of some of the stuff I'm trying to go for.
I'm going to turn this right back around on you, though, because one of the other things that you really, really offer and you're I don't know, I don't want to be all cheering about your system, but you can actually and you do bring a lot of these little buttonizer kind of things automatically with your technology because there's so much easier to integrate in the modern web world where you live. We do. We have a lot of things. Clay Studio is now FM Better Forms. I'm sorry, better forms is not a studio and Clay Studio has a lot of a lot of history built in based on on features that people need. Right. We have things like messaging. So real time, real time messaging.
Oh, yeah. Either peer to peer. You know, if you really wanted we've had we've had some of our team build pong games that, you know, it's like that real time. Yeah, real time, you know, real time, real time messaging system optimization, caching. So to de-burden FileMaker, you know, we have one user, he's got almost a million users, you know, a million users powered by, you know, effectively one FileMaker server. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, you know, you're not you're not going to see that with. The most I've ever done was nine hundred thousand. I'm kidding. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's that's some serious scale, right? So, you know, there maybe there's not they're not always concurrently, but they have around the clock around the world.
There's, you know, huge hundreds of people, hundreds of people all the time. And that type of infrastructure structure is something that that's it's not a buttonize it thing, but it's it's a type of thing that that it's a solved problem. Right. And it's not something that you're going to just vibe code out into an app. Yeah, right. That that that that experience. So that's one of the things we bring there. Going forward now, what we're going to be selling is, as I mentioned, it's going to be the governance, it's going to be the ability to have code repositories, safe deployment of AI code, bringing that code really, really close to the end user, which is the person who who has the knowledge of the job.
So the domain worker now suddenly can create the things that they want to create safely and enterprise your IT department is going to be super, super happy with that because they can control and they can monitor everything. There's no unknowns there. There's transparency into the entire stack. Everything is highly sandboxed as well. So we'll start with that. And the biggest, most exciting thing is it'll be able to run on prem. It'll be some of it will be open source. You're not going to be locked to our company. You're generating standard code and you can take it away with you as well. Yeah, that's amazing. That's another awesome kind of file maker benefit that is really otherwise hard to do in a lot of these platforms because they're just cloud period, you know, so that's where the direction is.
That's going to be part of our second product. It's called Clay Run. It'll be released every next quarter, roughly for for beta. This is not something that we can just vibe code and it's not that we don't have the experience to write. We we do all agentic engineering internally for for new development now. But there's so much thought that we have to put into architecting the the infrastructure of the fabric that we're building. So, yeah, for sure. For sure. And that's again, I think one of the really big clear messages is what are the limits of this vibe coding? And one of the things I really have to put is you can vibe code something and you can bring it to the customer, look at it and it's like, oh, my God, this is 90 percent, 95 percent done. And then you realize that you have another 95 percent to do to finish it.
Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a double principle kind of thing going on there. And, you know, and this might change. But today and probably for the next year, we can get to we can get to V1 really, really fast, right? We can get the version one of a of an app by vibe coding. It's really what I'm saying is it's not really realistic. No, like like when you get. You know, my joke, which I think is actually really true, is you vibe code and it looks like one point. Oh, yes. But then when you actually, you know, when it meets the enemy, yeah, I should realize that there's another 95 percent that last five percent is not the small part. That's the you know, that's the concept now.
And when you get to that, yeah, we can get a proof of concept of the door. Yeah, right. And the proof of concept is totally fine. If you're not exposing it to too many people, if it's if it's there's no nothing exciting to be hacked in in it or anything like that. Yeah. Now getting to version twenty seven is a whole different story. Yeah. Right. And you can ask any engineer that's worked on that's using AI on a serious app that has has, you know, a sprawling code base and sprawling not because it's old, but because it does a lot. Sure. Right. You can't just easily implement the feature. You can't just go and say, hey, I want to add this new feature. I mean, arguably sometimes I haven't done it.
At that scale, I would think that if the app is properly structured. Well, I don't know. You can tell me I'm wrong here. But I mean, if if you're doing it with a modern, not necessarily modern, but like a normal way of development where everything's on GitHub and you're checking and there's all segmented out and and you can, you know, check out and check in code segments and everything is version controlled. And when you're working on a new feature, it's a discrete thing. Yeah, you can you can test it. It's in a dev environment. These are all things that you can't really easily do with FileMaker, that it would be more possible. And I would also say that as AI comes out there, it actually would have the ability to do things like look at the entire code base and kind of factor what the other thing.
Yeah. Well, that's just to pause there. You said look at the entire code base. Yeah. AI skims the most LLMs or most agentic harnesses will skim the entire code base. So they'll say, OK, these are all your APIs. These are all your services that you have coming into your your back end, let's say. So that's actually not obvious that just skims it is supposed to deep analysis. Correct. Right. So unless you're looking at each one of those, you know, you're looking at the contracts or every one of those services that your back end is is is is providing and I'm talking specifically about back end because front end, yes, there's vulnerabilities, but the front end is fully hackable.
If you're talking about a browser, you open up everything, you can inspect everything. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that they think the security lives there, but the security has to live in the back. Yeah. And there's another thing FileMaker very much brings to the table, right? The security at the back end, you look dubious. I mean, well, I think it does, but FileMaker has a few benefits there. I mean, it's pretty opaque, right? Like we we at these conferences and things like that sometimes talk about security. And it's it's it's it's pretty walled off that we don't see exactly how everything works. And I think I'm not saying security by obscurity is a good thing, but knowing less definitely is better than having something.
Yeah. Semi open, fully open source is a different story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I'm thinking about like like security to making sure that your clients only have access to stuff that they're supposed to see. No one can go in and delete all the data. So so this is interesting. So there's some there's some talk somebody mentioned in the most recent talk. They said, well, how come FileMaker doesn't just rewrite their stack? Yeah. And to Mongo. Yeah. And it's really good. And yeah, and first of all, it may not be the best, best, best database. And it's just the popular one. It was a popular one a few years ago. Superbasics was the popular one when when a genetic companies like Lovable and such came out.
Yeah. And now we're starting to see a move right to the Postgres, right, even though it's a derivative. So or vice versa. And Postgres is actually number four on the on the database charts. Right now, I think Oracle's one and and I think they're like the top five. So that changes from time to time. But I wanted to ask them, what is it specifically that you want out of that database that you don't have that you don't have in FileMaker? Because we've been using FileMaker as a database purely as a back end for the last eight years, that's how since ever better from its inception. And it's been a phenomenal, phenomenally great. Database. I mean, there's a couple of quirks, but you have those quirks in any any system.
It doesn't matter what database that we're using. And you have to learn how to work around that. I mean, my answer to that is pretty clear. And that's FileMaker is a single point of failure. FileMaker server is a single point of failure. And if you have another system that is an appliance like Mongo and systems like it, everything is redundant. It's kind of always up and you know, you don't have a single thing that you stop and start better or worse, but I mean, that has to be an issue for that client. You have it has a million users hitting it. You know, there's there's necessary times that FileMaker server has to be brought down and brought back up. Although in your case is probably really good way so you can work around it because you can control the front end.
But like in a normal file maker database, when people are accessing it with the FileMaker client, you know that that's definitely an issue. And I'm not saying it can't be worked around, but but like me, what I've dreamed about for years was it was a way around that where I didn't have to have to have the expertize and worry about FileMaker server, because I think that's kind of anyway what I've dreamed about different. Yeah, I think it's the fact that we do have really deep knowledge right there is when something's off, something's weird about performance or something's like we have accessibility and we understand it. Yeah, right. We can contact other people and so on.
So so I think anyway, yeah, just returning FileMaker, I think it's a great back end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, even for the companies that are that are thinking, oh, well, maybe we should switch to something else because I was walking through the airport and I saw Oracle or Salesforce, you know, you know, I think we have to start to realize now that there's amazing things that we're going to be able to do now, even more so with just the combination of integration. Yeah. Bring the web outside, you know, whether you're using Clay Studio or you're scratch coding something, whatever you're doing. Or a new product, which maybe sometime in the future we'll talk in depth about it.
But it's been it's been great and I'm actually pretty, pretty positive, pretty optimistic about the future there. I mean, I really am, too. I mean, I was, you know, casting a little shade or whatever, but I definitely see a huge advantage to having found Microsoft for the back end. And like we were talking about, it's been your it's been a pillar of success for you for this past many, many years. So. Yeah. And hundreds of our users. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always great to talk with you. I'm so glad to see you. Thanks for coming all the way over here. Thanks again for your time. All right, man. Cheers. Yohannes, always nice to catch up, sir. Likewise, likewise.
So you're here at Vienna Calling. And then my favorite conference in the world, of course, is EngageU. I don't want to like, you know, thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. But I wanted to I guess for two questions, like what did you think of this conference? And what is the big plans for the changes coming up? So Vienna is always nice to meet up with fellow developers. But also it's an on-conference conference. So it's a little bit different to what we did at EngageU. But I love the atmosphere. And that's just looking out of the picture, being in a historical park, museum quarters, it's fantastic. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, we do have something else. We do have what I think is the biggest English speaking platform community conference taking place in the fall.
It doesn't have to be what you think it actually factually is. It might be. It might be. But I think that's going to be the case this year. And therefore, I think we've raised it to become three day of a conference, three full days. So first, I will have one full track out of three that will be focusing only about businesses because we get so many requests from partners, from players to talk of what do we actually do with it? What do we do with the platform? What are our benefits? And now with AI, where should we go? So we've started to talk to clients. We started to talk to customers and then starting to invite them to our conference so that they can actually see what we're up to.
Yeah. So we're looking forward to see other things coming out of this conference, not only technical parts. Yeah, that especially makes sense to you. Running a large partner, like a partner company, because you have such a direct connection to so many businesses from having helped them over the last 20 years. I don't know how long you've been around. A long time. Yes, very long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's day one. Then what? So day one will still be like two tracks of tech. And Clarice will be there with full five people talking in and out. They will be present throughout those three days. Nice. Do you have the right five this time or? So everything. So we have this perfect spot in Malmo, it's three minutes walk from the train station, you fly into Copenhagen, you take a minute train and leaves every 20 minutes across and then super central of Malmo.
It's a super nice hotel, new conference. And you're told you stay at the same place. We eat at the same place. I've talked about it. I've talked about it before. But like the things I love, love, love about DevCon from a long time ago was that everyone is there. So the social aspect, as good as the conferences and the sessions, there's there's so much more benefit, honestly, than having the the chance to connect with your peers and get ideas and asking questions about their presentation or just compare notes until, well, when I was younger, two, three, four in the morning, whatever. Now I stop at one. I think when we were younger, it was hard to grasp everything from a conference because there was so much new, right?
You went to different sessions and then you're trying to grasp it all. But it's just becoming like when you try to produce a sausage, the thing was just big enough for one. But now that is you are trying to grasp these small things from different sessions. But the overall is to meet people and see what are they doing right now? Where are they heading? Yeah. What do they think about AI? What do they do with servers? Whatever options they have on the table right now. You know, it's funny, as we talk about it, I only just now realize that there was obviously in the younger part of my career, there was times going to conference where I was learning, learning, learning, soaking up information.
Then from having been a developer for so long, there came a point that I the sessions didn't have a lot of new content for me because of the amount of stuff that I've been doing and know what now I'm learning, learning, learning again because there's so much new information. It's definitely a new chapter with AI in so many different directions. Yeah. And now that we also see that Clarisse is making some small steps towards what we are kind of looking forward to. I think this conference would also be a lot about the new stuff that's hopefully going to be presented in that conference. Yeah. So I hope there will be a nice debate going off after the release of 26 and all the way up to our conference, get started off what's going to be there.
What do we need and what can we do? And then it will be like a used party of like new things brought into the table to do with AI. What are the dates of the conference and the website? Yeah. So we start on the last day of September, the 30th of September and then the two first day of October. OK, so that's a Wednesday. So get in early and we can show you around in Malmo. OK, I know what we'd like to say and then stay the full week and enjoy it. I think the whole week is yeah. And for the listeners who are in the US, North America, get over here. You really need to come over to Europe and go to this conference. And like even I don't know, there's just so many so many reasons why it's great to get over here.
Thanks for your time. It's always great to chat. Thanks. Always a pleasure. I'm here with Vincenzo Bonanno. Ciao, Matt. Ciao, Bella. Hello. Hello. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. So a conference here in Vienna. Yeah, just just practicing your German a little bit. I'm busy in. Yeah, so you what's your current role with beeswax? You have an awesome title, don't you? Chief innovation officer. I like that. It's what do you take from this conference? What do you what do you think? You know, I gave a presentation on the first day. And my favorite thing. Yes, I love that topic. And one of the themes was about iteration. Iteration is still a superpower for us. It only gets amplified with the effects of A.I.
I would say that a lot of us that are exploring A.I. and like as many people said, like even Chris yesterday or this morning said, just be curious and keep exploring, keep learning. And coming to a conference for me is also an opportunity to learn. I've picked up quite a few things that I didn't know. And and and as in the the post that Jay Welshopper did on LinkedIn, which I noticed like a couple of days ago and I pointed out one of the things he says, you kind of like to argue for, you know, your point of view strongly, but hold it loosely in the sense, you know, like you're passionate about what you believe in strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, at some points of you. You hear that we're shared that I don't really agree on and whatever. But, you know, and you point you point your your point of view out. Yeah. And yeah, you see how it goes. But I definitely learned some new things. So iteration is one of my favorite things. What about some other ones? Technical debt, technical debt. We've never talked about that before. Yeah, it's been a fascination for me for a long time to define it briefly. Technical debt. How would you like a brief description? I mean, it's it was coined by the person who now I forget his name, but a long time ago, not quite a while ago. And it basically defined as you trade moving quickly for, you know, technical debt.
And think of it like this, like you're exploring a new idea. You build a layout, you add some some fields and then you add all these fields. By by like a number, like almost like repetition fields. Right. But they're numbered. And you think, oh, I'm going to do this calendar thing and I'm going to have all these fields, one for each day, and then you realize like, oh, there's a better way. And what you do is you don't clean up after yourself and you just go to this other thing and you keep going and you leave everything behind. I've seen solutions that had like a set of 50 layouts from the first version of it. And then when they upgrade it to the next version, they have like the V2 set of layouts and then the V3 set of layouts.
So there's like one hundred and fifty layouts in there that are not used. Yeah. Maybe the best one I remember is seeing a solution where I would see I.D. and then I would see another field called the really I.D. and then I would see another field called the really, really I.D. Oh, man, that's that's cringeworthy. I just didn't know if there was another really, really, really I.D., you know, to be aware of. So the thing is, like, the really, really I.D. is not the one that's actually in use. Yeah. And you got to go look at the graph. Yeah. Sometimes I'll make like friendly I.D., like your invoice number or something. Yeah, because it's hard and a lot older databases didn't have that.
But, you know, like in general, like I've been doing this, you've been doing this a long time, what's been fascinating to see over this over so many years is to to see that sometimes we have these hacks and we added schema to to to execute the hack. Right. And now we've seen that like, oh, well, you don't need to do that because now you have this high condition calc or you have a layout calculations or something. So what is beautiful is to see that schema is getting distilled down to schema like real essence, real. Exactly. Yeah. But I mean, technical debt there. You can't go deleting, you know, tags and relationships and things like that that have been in a managed database easily because finding them, getting them used.
This is one of the reasons why one of the things I preach is. Is to put the complexity at the right layer. Right. Which is an automatic way of handling technical debt in a lot of ways. So if you use the schema and you use the calculation fields, which is the way that it used to be, like in older versions of FileMaker, there weren't other ways to do it other than using a calculation field. And if you wanted a portal sorted, you had to have a second a second relationship that was sorted. Right. And then the other ones, like for different reasons. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what's coming, what they showed, because we listened to the Claris presentation yesterday and what's coming is the ability to build web based layouts, et cetera.
And, you know, with the beauty of web development, you can do things you never even had the possibility of doing. So that's really exciting. And I think that will also provide us with an opportunity to reduce even more technical debt. And get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So putting it at the script layer and putting it on the interface, I think there are places where I think it's maybe easier to manage it. So let's talk specifically about A.I. and how it manages technical debt. Because I have a couple of opinions there, too, but I want to hear yours. Yeah, I think I think A.I. is definitely going to have an impact on how we code. That's for sure. Yes. And it's and it's already. And we're going to get.
We're going to get proper tooling and plumbing to do that. I think the beauty is that we can ask it to review some code and tell us like, hey, you know, like, can I make this better or what's the problems with it? As a matter of fact, when I started exploring extending inspector with an MCP. Yeah, I had this idea that I wanted to give it a script. And then, you know, I had a script that I would call through the MCP. You say, I'm going to give you the file name, the solution ID and the script. And that's in that file. Yeah. And then I want you to return me all the steps in that script and then analyze the script steps and see if there's any problems. Sure. Where where it gets interesting is normally like if a field is missing, you'll see field missing.
Yeah. Perform script unknown. Go to layout unknown. Those are easy things to find and you can spot them by just looking at the script. But where it gets. Interesting is the logic, the subtleties of like, hey, you have this if block where it's checking for this condition. And further down in the script, you're doing another check and you don't need to do that because you've already checked it and you're within that block. You would. Those things are really hard to catch. Yeah. And it's like, oh, OK, I can simplify my code. I can remove that or you've declared a variable and the variables misspelled somewhere. Yeah. And, you know, those are really hard things to catch, Jason.
Jason lowercase. Yeah, exactly. I bet that's a tough one. Yeah. So he said the other aha moment I had with with AI. When once I got that working, I thought, OK, so I'm returning the steps of the script. And if I wanted to, I wanted to I wanted to have a look at the whole execution path of the whole script, like this guy calls the subscript and this other subscript, etc. And I was under the impression like, oh, my God, that's a lot of work. I'm going to have to give all I have to traverse the the tree structure, every script that's called and return all the steps and say, wait a minute, AI already knows how to fetch the steps of the script. And I said, if this is the root script I'm calling and you can analyze it and see what other subscripts I'm calling, just recursively call the same MCP tool and get yourself all the steps for those.
Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's building the whole tree and analyzing the whole execution path. So that was an aha moment for me to leverage AI to get those benefits. Right. So like it's yeah, it's it's it's spending the time with AI to realize that like it really becomes an assistant, like, you know, a helper. Yes, definitely. Yeah. So I guess what I know, one of the things I've encountered and I wish for, like in that example of the 50 layouts for version one, 50 for version two, some script somewhere still uses one of the layouts from version two or whatever. And so if you can't you can't just go delete those layouts. So there's not really a way to know what what stuff is actually in production that uses some of the old stuff.
So you can't just go deleting and cleaning. That's what's really hard. And I kind of found that under managing technical debt is a way to delete the things that are that are no longer in use. Well, I mean, you have to balance that that's that that need or that or that expectation, because like the tools that are out there, inspector based elements and I find perception. So with these tools, you can, you know, look at look at where the references are to a layout or a script. Right. Yeah. So that'll that'll tell you things that are unreferenced, which is great. Yeah. But you can also go to a layout by calculation or by by number or calculation by name or something.
Right. And and that's indirection. Right. So you have other spots of indirection. But the beauty of that is you can scan your code and say, am I using any indirection? And your confidence level on deleting something that is not referenced goes up significantly. Right. So if the tool can analyze and say, hey, I looked over the code base. There's no there's no references of you using go to layout by indirection. Right. So and this layout is not referenced anywhere. That means these are the layouts you can delete, safely delete. Right. And unless some other application calls of it, I guess I can't. Well, like put it this way. If you do build layouts that are API layouts for other systems to access.
That's it. Right. And a data API layout or whatever you can do. And if you're meticulous and you want to document these things as you build them, you can write a script to say go to layout this and the comments at the top of the script, you say that this is only for purposes of documenting direct dependencies. Exit the script at the very beginning and then you add your code, like go to layout such and such, and now that layout is referenced in your system. I see. Right. So when you go to look for it, it's going to say, hey, these layouts are referenced. That never occurred to me. That is a really good idea. That's it. That's a very, very useful tip. Yeah, I actually put a bunch of stuff after the after the end.
If after the exit layout, like a lot of stuff that I'm kind of working on. This might work. This is another version. But I put it down at the bottom, but I never thought about doing it like specifically to a documentation. Yeah, you could put it there as a matter of fact, as as we move into this new paradigm of working with AI and AI building web based layout, you may end up in a situation where, oh, I need to need a layout for this purpose or I need a script because I've told the AI to put a button to trigger a certain script in that UI. Yeah. So you can document all those in a script. As a matter of fact, you could probably kind of say that a different way.
Like as more of your application goes into goes out of FileMaker and goes into a JavaScript code and a Web, then you can manage. You can clean it and manage it using AI. Oh, yeah, of course. So that's that's I think that's actually we finally have an agent that has time to go do that because we would never be able to prioritize that ourselves. But I'm just saying, like, if you use a tool as a central place to document it and you want to be methodical, you could put it in there. But like you said, you could use AI or, you know, this stuff is going to be accessible. You can scour it and inspect it that way. Yeah. Cool. What were some of your other favorite things in there?
Well, I talked about timing. That's another one of my favorite topics. Right. So I've been lately I've been with Hanzo and Richard Carlton Live TV, right. And we talk about performance measurement and, you know, brought up the topic of measuring things and understanding the performance implications of different script steps and how and so what it's interesting about it is I showed a very simple example where I said, look at how much time it takes for this from this script step to this script step using get UTC microseconds, right. And and so the crowd answered the questions and all this. And then I showed another example where I put I bookended those steps around a set field step and I was kind of it's like a like a tricky question, a tricky question, which I got wrong.
Yeah, well, I mean, it was it was pointed there so that you could see that, like, it isn't the set field issue that is the option that's going to take time. Which is what I'm sure it was. It's it's it's an it's an implicit it's an implicit on record open that happens at the time that you set the field. So if you open the record before and then you measure the set field, you'll see like, oh, that's really so little time. It's even on a hosted file. Right. Which which then presumably means, well, I guess two questions, right? Nerdy nerding out. So if you do an open record and then a series of set fields, they're all going to be super fast. Yeah. But what if you just do a set field set field set field without an open record?
Well, the first one takes the hit. Once the record is open, then the other ones are or the record is open. Now, those ones are going to be less less of a hit. So it's not there's not like an inherent value in doing open record. Well, well, I mean, unless you you want to programmatically take the steps to know that you can open the record, et cetera, but, you know, if you do things transactionally, then it's a whole another animal. Yeah. So like open transaction, probably the same kind of situation. Yeah. And then you'll see the difference, right? If you run that locally over a WAN versus you run it on the server. And the whole point I was trying to make is use these steps or techniques to learn how much overhead you're getting and how much overhead it's taking. Right.
Because we're talking microseconds to like a third of a second. Yeah, that's a huge difference. This is one of the things you and I argued about a little bit is which of these things do you measure that are academic and which of them are actually meaningful? Well, an open record is not academic. And because that one, you know, the time it takes to set a field on a hosted file is is noticeable to the user. Right. If you have a if you have a table and we've encountered this in older solutions, that has, you know, several hundred fields in it, many of which are indexed and with auto enter, just creating a record, I've seen customers take three, four or five seconds. Right. And, you know, yeah.
So why does it do that? Right. So that's just the whole point of my my bringing up the topic was to get people to be curious. Right. So this leads you to curiosity to say, oh, what if this what is that? And I showed an example where I said, OK, what about refresh window? Do you think it's going to be much more expensive over a WAN over a LAN? They were the same. Yeah, I was saying, you know, so like it's like it informs your knowledge and you become more, you know, kind of like, oh, OK, well, you become more confident in the code that you write because, you know, like, OK, this is not going to be impactful or what not. Good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, it doesn't have to always only be AI in this world.
Kind of. Although saying that, I'm kind of wondering how much can you use AI to track and understand these things? But stuff like this, probably not. Right. Well, you have to really go be curious and test it yourself. Yeah, exactly. I think the only the main issue also for me was and I think Hanzo would agree, is that currently we have to modify our code to get those insights. And I would say it would be nice in the future if we had like some profiling tool that we or some developer enhancements where you could say, you know, profile this script and just you just run it and then you could look and see, like, from here to here, how long did that take or from here to here.
And you're never modifying your script. Right. And the other beautiful thing, if we could have it one day, is to turn on some kind of logging so that you could log every time a script got executed. How long did it take? Did it get any errors? So then you could like it's been running for six months. Let's look at all the scripts, digest the log or something and then do a heat map on all the scripts that you have in the system. And then you discover like, hey, this script never gets run by anybody. Maybe it gets only run once a year or some other weird thing. But so far, this script has never been run. So how close do we get that with a checkbox on the server to do that?
I can't remember the name of the checkbox. It basically kind of does an audit log and checks the performance logging. We're not there. What are you talking about? We don't have that there. Well, there's a there's a checkbox on the server level that you can actually do a bunch of tracking and it tracks all the performance of things going on in a FileMaker database. It kind of and I'm not sure if it logs all the stuff we're talking about, but that's a function of FileMaker server that's been there for years. But I've never seen a way to log script execution times. I don't know if it does that. I think it might track other things. That's my question. It might take like layout loading and other things.
You can you can analyze it to get a bunch of other things. And I think that may be the layer that this stuff gets. Maybe what you're referring to is top call. That's one. Oh, OK, so. But, you know, if a script, if a script doesn't fit into the category of the top twenty five scripts, it won't get logged, but it got executed. Yeah. So you're talking about a much more deep, low level log, which which would by its nature affect the performance. Right. But that's the point. But that's OK. But that's the point. Like if in development or staging you turn this on and you go through the system and do some testing, then you can double check things to make sure that, you know, things are working correctly. Awesome.
Yeah. And so it's always great to chat with you, sir. Nice to chat with you. Nice to see you here in Vienna. In a little bit of a turnabout, I'm here with Javier Dura and you are going to be interviewing me rather than me interviewing you. Yes. Yes. Well, we are here with Matt Navar for FileMaker Magazine. Yes. So first of all, Matt Navar, for people who don't know you, tell us who you are and what you do. So I am a FileMaker developer for, gosh, 30, 40 years now. I've been podcasting for 20 years in the FileMaker community. I've started and run companies and sold them and then moved to Greece four years ago with the thought of slowing down and that didn't work out.
So I'm full tilt in FileMaker still. Yeah. So developer and mainly really training right now. Yeah. You have been in the platform for a long time, as you mentioned. What keeps you hooked? I mean, what do you think that you get excited about the platform, about FileMaker? I'm actually more excited about what I do than I remember ever being maybe, I don't know, a really, really long time anyway. And it's definitely about AI and AI integration. And the one area that I really focus on is getting AI integrated into FileMaker databases. Everyone is using AI to write code and to test code and to plan and things like that. And that's obviously great. But I'm really focusing on how can we make the applications better for our clients?
So for internal developers, what can they do internally to have better quality? And for partner companies, what can we do for our customers to solve problems in really easy ways, you know, a page of code, a few hours of work. That's my jam. You also are well-known now for your roundtables and your debates and sessions. We are now in Vienna, in Vienna calling. So what do you like this type of format? Way less prep. So that's one one part. But I think also because of doing podcasting for so long, I really enjoy interviewing and kind of asking questions and kind of getting that information out. Yeah. You know, there's so many people with so much more expertise than me, one of which is you, and getting a chance to ask questions about it, to take kind of the spotlight away from me for sure.
And also, I learned so much that way. Starting the whole podcast with Christopher Light, with AI was so I can pester him and ask him questions about it and learn. And that worked out quite well. Yeah. You also run free classes on Zoom. Yeah, pretty much every week I do on Thursdays. This is great with kids running by. I do. I do a free class. I'm on a given AI topic and FileMaker integration and I have rebranded. So I was Navar training. I still really do training, but now I'm Navar.AI. So you can kind of find out about those classes there. And so, yeah, that's been really, really fun to do. And are you giving these classes for free? That's a lot of work. What's your final purpose?
So they are for free, but the part of it is just to give back to the community and also people make appointments with me. So it's a lot of work to do that. So I'm training individual people, you know, on an hourly rate basis to kind of start with AI. So a lot of people just really don't know where to start there. And to get from zero to starting using it is not obvious. You can't really use AI to kind of get to that point. So I'm really trying to get people from from here, you know, from nothing to the point where they can start using it, seeing the benefit, trying an integration and seeing that light bulb kind of start going on and get them to the place where like, OK, now I understand what this is.
Now I can actually use AI to teach me AI. I mean, we can consider you more or less an AI expert. So what do you think most FileMaker developers are using AI in the wrong way? I think I don't know if I would say that they're using it in the wrong way. I think we're just not using it. And that's the biggest. Problem, I think, they're not using it to solve little daily problems. I think maybe the temptation of developers to use it the wrong way is to try to do things that are really big. That are not like, yeah, from scratch, like, oh, let's going to rewrite our whole organization and we're going to try to take these people out of the mix and to try to thoroughly automate the system so we can push a button and a whole entire project comes into existence and it seems like that could work.
But it it takes a huge amount of work to do that and there's a lot of stuff you have to do to get it. I don't know if I've seen anyone try to do that. I've talked to a lot of people who that's what their plan is. And then a plan that's that big doesn't really ever get started. So that might be something people are doing wrong. And what kind of projects do you think that AI make no sense at all? That's also a really good question. So I think there's a lot of databases that the industry has been using FileMaker for 20 years. The company has been using it for 20 years and the problem is solved. The FileMaker database works the way it needs to work and they don't really need any other things in it.
And, you know, the like for any kind of a any kind of a thing where they're tracking physical work, right, so it's tracking people who go into the field and install things or repair things or inspect machines or run machinery, a lot of Internet of Things type things. I think that there's a lot of situations like that where if it's just working, it doesn't need, you know, this modernization. Yeah. Or little things only, but not not a big rewrite. And there's other organizations, other types of companies that really can benefit from large changes anyway. So that's that's my thought on that. AI moves fast and FileMaker moves slow from my point of view. We only have one new version every year.
How can you think that we can solve the situation and to be able to keep up with what we're doing and to follow the AI rhythm? Yeah, I like that. So one of the things that came out with a new script step that allows you to do a direct AI API call that script step when it came out, the most current model at the time from OpenAI was like GPT-4. And you only use a certain endpoint and it didn't give you a lot of visibility. So when I was looking at my applications, I basically switched back to insert from URL, which does everything. So insert from URL and the web viewer open up such a crazy amount of possibility for AI that I don't think it, you know, anything that FileMaker does, as long as I don't break those things, it almost doesn't matter because the world that's open to you from those two capabilities give you almost everything you need.
I mean, I'd wish for more, but really, whether they come out with new features or not, doesn't matter. So what would be your advice for someone at the FileMaker community that has never used AI at all? Go to my website and make an appointment with me. Oh, yeah. And I do free 30 minute appointments. So if someone just wants to talk, they want me to copy and paste code from the stuff I show in the demo, definitely do that. It's great. I love the community aspect. I live in a rural area in Greece, in Greece on the island of Crete. And I love, love, love the community and connecting with people. And all of my career has been connecting to people one on one or one on small group.
So that's, you know, what that's a specific way I can help people. But I think if they just don't know, I think they have to try something to create something maybe with maybe without FileMaker, but the creative capability of using something like Cloud Code is so fun and so rewarding. And it just really unlocks the creative joy. We are now in Vienna in the Vienna Calling event 2026. There's been a lot of discussion about AI because especially this is a conference. What are your thoughts of this kind of event and conference when where everything is kind of chaos? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No planned sessions. Well, planned sessions in advance, but they can change them on a daily basis.
I'm really used to this format because many years ago, 10 plus years ago, I think we did Paws on Air conferences and those were big in Seattle and L.A. I did one there in New York. It was one anyway. So I did several of them in Portland and I really like that format a lot. And I think I was talking to Philip about it actually today. But if there's a conversation, his point, if there's if there's a topic that three people are interested in, then it should be a session because there's going to be a lot more than three people who would find it useful. And I think that's I think that's definitely the case for a lot of these questions. You know, letting the community decide what we want to talk about and share and ask questions about.
So let's wrap this let's wrap up this interview here. What's coming next from the bar? What are you planning to do? What are your next? What are you working on? Gosh, the thing that has me most excited lately. The two things the two things that I'm preparing are use of the claw things like open claw and Hermes, things like that, which I sort of see as an ultra robot like we've had FileMaker robots. It's been passed a long time ago, right? We have like a machine that's logged into FileMaker that does that. Well, open claw is basically a machine, a dedicated Mac or whatever VPS or instance that's running all the time. That is yours to control. That is private.
And what I'm working on is having that machine having access to a FileMaker database via MCP or being the data API or whatever. And so its work is actually communicating with FileMaker its memory is the FileMaker database. And then different FileMaker databases can assign tasks to that machine using FileMaker, and then that machine can use its ridiculously powerful local sandbox and all of the other hundreds of things that it can do and do all that work and then send the results back to FileMaker. So I've been playing with that a lot. And I think there's I think there's untold capability down that road. I'm still kind of even visualizing the everyday things that that can do that are going to be super useful to people.
I think it's kind of early for open claw. I think, you know, it's rough, like it's not something you should set up unless you know what you're doing. Yeah. For today. But Google or Apple could be in the position of saying, oh, we're going to turn the switch and now we're going to give this capability to you and then it's going to open up and become a whole huge thing. Yeah. So anyway, that's what I'm working on next. Sounds interesting. Yeah, it's fun. What are you working on? Well, I'm working in some integrations using AI plus make to make some kind of interaction with real customers via social networks like Instagram, any application from Meta, Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp.
OK, so my customers will be able, not my customers, but the AI will be able to answer direct messages from all these platforms. But I'm working on it right now. Yeah. Are you having fun? Yeah, it's really fun. I mean, testing these new platforms and all this stuff is really interesting for us. We have been doing more or less the same thing with FileMaker for a long time. I'm in a ridiculously lucky position that I have a lot of time to just experiment and try and test and distill is really the main thing I'm trying to do. And then share. People like you and me that like to invest in new things and to talk to people, we need to invest our time trying new things, not working every day in the same task and the same boring thing.
And ruling out all the ones that fail, which there are many. OK, so thank you very much for your time, Matt. And we will meet soon in one of your Zoom calls. That's it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in. Amen.