Tag Archive for 'Chad Sager'

Please Join us May 24: SIMPLICITY: Concepts and Case Studies

Published on May 19, 2011. 0 Comments

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker Developer Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, May 24th 2011 at 6:00 PM. The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office.

414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034
Google Map

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1200

SIMPLICITY: Concepts and Case Studies

Chad Sager will present concepts from a recent series of blog posts on phillyfilemaker.org: “Don’t confuse me, I’m just a stupid developer. How treating yourself like an idiot can make your FileMaker application easy to understand and maintain”. Chad will discuss a few development principles that can simplify your software architecture, while maintaining flexibility and power.

Colin Keefe will give a short example of a modular data entry workflow that manages multiple entities: To Dos, Activities, Chat Logs, Milestones – through one script, one table and (potentially) one layout.

Both of these presentations should be pretty short, so we’re planning on spending the remainder of the time in a roundtable discussion on simplifying code. Continue reading ‘Please Join us May 24: SIMPLICITY: Concepts and Case Studies’

 
Published in FileMaker and Meeting Announcements by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 3 of 3

Published on April 29, 2011. 2 Comments

I’ve been posting about a few principles that have helped me minimize the pain of understanding complexity in my own code. See part 1 of this series where I briefly discussed leaving yourself and others notes about the “why” of your design decisions. And see part 2 for discussions about simplifying your code.

Continuing with the movement towards simplicity; whenever possible make functions and scripts single use and encapsulated. We can think about breaking functions (or scripts) down into their smallest useable parts as simplification, or we can talk about it as encapsulation. We broke down a confusing custom function into separate parts in order to improve readability. What we also gained was some compartmentalization and modularity. It’s difficult to separate the two principles of simplicity and encapsulation.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 3 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 2 of 3

Published on April 28, 2011. 2 Comments

See part 1 of this series where I briefly discussed leaving yourself and others clues about the “why” of your design decisions.

The second principle I want to talk about helps with the “how” and “what”.

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
- Albert Einstein

Or how it’s more often paraphrased:

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Take the time to make things simpler. This is much more about the “how” and “what” of programming.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 2 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .

I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 1 of 3

Published on April 27, 2011. 0 Comments

Our human brain has the amazing capacity to remember and understand the things we do. What’s more amazing is our brain’s capacity to overestimate how much it has the ability remember and understand the things we do. My average shelf life for remembering how my code works is about two months. That is to say if I don’t touch a part of an application for up to two months, I can jump in and get back to work, no problem. After that I have to study it a bit and get my bearings again. The longer I go the worse it gets. Your mileage may vary, but no one can escape this problem.

There are a few things that have helped me minimize the pain described above, which I’ll be posting about over the next couple of days.

Continue reading ‘I’m just a stupid developer, don’t confuse me… part 1 of 3′

 
Published in FileMaker by Chad Sager. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , , .

Please join us August 24: 2010 FileMaker DevCon Recap

Published on August 20, 2010. 0 Comments

Greetings FileMaker Enthusiasts,

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, August 24th 2010 at 6:00 PM.

The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office:

+  414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034
+  Full Google Map: http://bit.ly/d7L05o (or just mess with the inline map below)

As always, pizza and soft drinks will be provided.

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1078

2010 DEVCON RECAP

Presenters: Jason Mundok, Chad Sager, Colin Keefe

The fifteenth annual FileMaker Developer Convention was held August 15-18 in San Diego CA.  We’ve just gotten back and can’t wait to share.  Come join us for a discussion of FileMaker GO, new techniques and technologies, and a general roundtable talk.

Continue reading ‘Please join us August 24: 2010 FileMaker DevCon Recap’

 
Published in DevCon and Meeting Announcements by Colin Keefe. Tags: Tags: , , , , , , .