Can you build an Assets Management database in FileMaker Pro in 80 minutes?
Thursday night Beezwax completed that challenge!
DIG-FM Speed-Developer Challenge
Team Beezwax (Vincenzo Menanno, Rennie Innis, Robert Ward and Jay Gonzales) were at Database Interest Group for FileMaker (DIGFM) last night, and entered the Speed-Developer Challenge. Here was the task:
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, would be to create a database that tracks University departmental assets like computers, laptops, monitors, and any office equipment of value. They would also like to be able to look up employees and quickly see what assets those employees have checked out or have been assigned to them … and it would be great if the customer could track the history of asset assignments and locations, and an employee’s equipment history … and asset detail should include a place to put pictures of assets, and employee detail should have a place to put pictures of employees … and you have 80 minutes…and there is no talking because you are working while the meeting presenter is presenting…etc.
The “no talking” rule made things very interesting. Most of the collaboration was using iChat, pen + paper, and vigorous finger pointing at laptop screens. We worked together on the database via a remote FileMaker Server, too.
While we worked, Eric Matthews demonstrated some solutions he’s built at San Jose State, and how FileMaker has enabled University departments to quickly implement some complex solutions for ID card readers, document management, et. al.
And The Winner Is…
We completed the Speed-Developer Challenge! Our resulting database was not quite feature complete (no picture support), but it was the only solution that was uploaded to the Challenge server, looking functional. Just give us another 10 minutes and I’ll bet we could have had SuperContainer implemented for photos!
The prize (courtesy of FileMaker, Inc.) was a copy of FileMaker Advanced, which was donated back to DIGFM as a raffle prize for the meeting.
Here is a picture of Vince getting up to present the winning solution, which was also a nice moment to mention the Beezwax FOCUS toolkit as the starting point for our solution.
And, finally, here is a time-lapse screen capture of Vince’s screen (courtesy of the Mac application ScreenNinja) during the challenge. 80 minutes of an intense multi-developer FileMaker project collapsed to 90 seconds. Enjoy!