Design Think Your Code

Have you ever opened an existing solution, took one look at the source code – and your eyes just glazed over – as if you were attempting to decipher the Matrix?

You’ve entered the world of DX, or “Developer Experience”.

Just as User Experience (UX) refers to the experience of users, Developer Experience (DX) focuses on the experience that Developers have within the code of your system. This applies whether that’s code you inherited, code you passed on to someone, or code you originally wrote — all situations which affect a person I would call ‘Developer Next’. This could certainly be your-good-self, in six months time.

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Rome FileMaker® Week: Docker, Node-RED, Native Script Transactions and a Chatbot

Vincenzo Menanno and Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax present at Rome FileMaker Week.

This week we’re in Italy… formazione, condivisione e ancora divertimento [training, sharing and more fun] …with the focus on innovations in Claris® FileMaker platform development. As realtori [conference speakers] at Rome FileMaker Week (October 6-8), Vince Menanno and Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax present three sessions:

  • Local FileMaker Development with Docker and Node-RED
  • The New Horizon: Native Script Transactions in FileMaker
  • Chatbot
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CQDF Montreal 2022 – Claris FileMaker

La 7e Conférence québécoise des développeurs FileMaker (CQDF) 2022: les 15 et 16 Septembre 2022 à l’Auberge Saint-Gabriel, Montreal. Vincenzo Menanno, Beezwax, présente “Le nouvel horizon | Transactions de script natif” avec Claris (FileMaker) Pro.

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Apple WWDC 2022 and beyond

The 2022 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) highlighted new ways for developers to build with APIs, introducing updates to Swift® and Safari®, revealing improvements in accessibility, and uncovering a mountain of innovative product upgrades and releases. We’re sharing a summary of news and resources we collected from WWDC 2022 sessions, along with an ongoing series of updates to this blog post.

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Highlighting Tableau Certification at Beezwax

Beezwax’s Tableau development and data analytics team has grown rapidly in recent years. In 2021, we achieved the status of Tableau Services Partner, and we’re proud to highlight several Beez — Josh, Sarah and Jules — who have earned Tableau certifications.

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FileMaker + Tableau | Embedded Dashboards & Expanding Possibilities

Vince Menanno from Beezwax presents at AutoEnter Live.

Let’s talk about Claris® FileMaker® and Tableau®!

As a speaker at AutoEnter Live, Vince presents Tableau as a great way for FileMaker developers to build dashboards, improve reporting, create visualizations and enable users to better understand their data. New techniques for embedding Tableau dashboards in FileMaker and using a Tableau Connector enable high-performance user interaction.

Learn more about how FileMaker + Tableau is a “match made in data heaven“, opening new possibilities as the two platforms combine to work as one.

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System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

Jinal Shah is a UX Designer at Beezwax. She shared the process for creating Google Display ads, using a system to optimize collaboration between Design and Marketing teams.

Our design team wanted to implement a design system that could quickly generate different variations of Google Display ads in multiple sizes. This system had to balance creative freedom and brand adherence. We wanted a user to be able to change content, colors, backgrounds, buttons and other visual elements without further involvement from a designer. However, it was important to create a controlled environment so the ads would stay on brand and follow a conceptual and visual pattern.

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The Metadata-verse: FileMaker Server Save as XML

As Claris gets further into an Agile groove, there are product releases more often, always with new features and improvements. Claris FileMaker 19.5 is no exception. It includes many new features, expanded extensibility, performance enhancements, and reliability improvements. I want to bring attention to one simple thing that promises to change the world for many of us in the FileMaker developer community: Save a Copy as XML…and the performance improvements running this on FileMaker Server.

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dotfmp.berlin Claris FileMaker Developers 2022

BERLIN, Germany – Our senior developer Christos Savva attended the dotfmp.berlin 2022 “Unconference” held in June in Berlin. The conference was the first in-person opportunity in over two years for leading Claris FileMaker developers across Europe to meet, share their work, and explore what’s happening in the developer community.

At dotfmp.berlin 2022, more than 70 developers from eighteen countries talked through tools and techniques from their Claris playgrounds. Adding to that excitement was participation by Claris’s engineering and product management teams.

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bBox v0.99 Integrates Claris FileMaker with JavaScript, Python 3 and Supports M1 Apple Silicon

We are pleased to release bBox version 0.99 for Claris® FileMaker® on macOS and Linux with new NodeJS and Python 3 integration, and M1 Apple silicon support for GraphicsMagick image processing and JQ JSON parsing functions.

About bBox Plug-in For FileMaker

bBox is a free utility plug-in to extend Claris FileMaker solutions to easily use macOS and Linux code libraries and functions from Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, C/C++, Bash/sh, XPath, and SQLite. Also included is a demo file with more than 210 examples of how you can put bBox functions to work for you.

bBox is available on macOS and Linux, and runs with either FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Server. Here’s what FileMaker Magazine had to say about bBox version 0.99:

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Tableau Conference 2022 – Day 3

We finished three days of Tableau Conference 2022 (TC22) in sunny Las Vegas! The in-person and virtual attendees from Beezwax’s Data Analytics & Tableau development teams shared a few more highlights of TC22 sessions, with information, insights and a few key takeaways.
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Tableau Conference 2022 – Day 2

Hello again from the end of Day 2 at Tableau Conference 2022 (TC22) in sunny Las Vegas! The in-person and virtual attendees from Beezwax’s Data Analytics & Tableau development teams shared more highlights of TC22 sessions, with information, insights and a few key takeaways.
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Tableau Conference 2022 – Highlights

Hello from Tableau Conference 2022 (TC22) in sunny Las Vegas! Attending in-person from Beezwax were Rob, Sarah, Vince and Jay from our Tableau/Analytics team, with several more Beez joining virtually.
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Custom Functions For Today’s FileMaker Devs Of Tomorrow

While working from home, and continuing to hone one’s FileMaker skills, it’s important for developers to stay active with ongoing learning pursuits. Claris® FileMaker®, as the world’s leading Workplace Innovation Platform, supports both the rapid creation of new custom apps, as well as the practical application of solutions to solve real-world business problems. Here, creative ideation is critical.

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Claris Connect integrates Eversign, FileMaker and more

Let’s talk about Claris Connect as the way to orchestrate data-driven workflows involving Eversign digital signatures, Claris FileMaker, Slack and a range of other possible platforms! Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax will walk through details for setting up these types of integrations.

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The Benefits of Automated Testing

Software changes over time. Your company’s web site this year does things you had no idea you needed two years ago. How can we keep the cost of change manageable?

Automated testing is one way. Especially for large software projects, the practice of automated testing can dramatically reduce the cost of adapting software to new business necessities.

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The Human Resource – Beezwax Anniversary Edition

26 years in, a founding Bee reflects.

Julian Nadel is president and founder of Beezwax. He’s celebrating the 26th Anniversary of Beezwax with this update to his original Beezwax Blog post.

In 2014, a colleague interviewed me about Beezwax; the interview transcript was the orginal basis for the article herein. It was then and still is now one of the only public summaries of my thoughts on how Beezwax works, and why.

Since being published, the article has been a meaningful springboard for many conversations I’ve had… with existing Beez, clients, and colleagues… and people new to Beezwax. As we reach another milestone – completing our 26th year – I’m taking this opportunity to revisit the article and provide an update.

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Beezwax Wins Claris Excellence Award

Beezwax Recognized for Advocacy Excellence, Sharing Expertise and Passion with Customers and Developers In the Claris Community

CUPERTINO, Calif. – Dec. 15, 2021Claris International Inc., an Apple company, named Beezwax Datatools Inc. as winner of the Advocacy Excellence Award as part of the Claris Excellence Awards for 2021, which honor Claris Partners and Claris Community members who have made outstanding contributions and accomplishments around the globe in 2021.

Partners and community members are selected for their award-worthy achievements using the Claris platform. The Advocacy Excellence Award recognizes a Claris partner for sharing expertise and passion while increasing awareness of Claris products and expanding the Claris Community of users and developers.

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OOP Fundamentals: Quick and Dirty Guide to Testing

There are entire books written on testing. And it surely feels more an art than a science. My approach is similar to Kent Beck’s:

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it. I do tend to make sense of test errors, so I’m extra careful when I have logic with complicated conditionals. When coding on a team, I modify my strategy to carefully test code that we, collectively, tend to get wrong.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/153565/1015566

He goes on to add that different people will have different strategies and, at the end of the day, you just have to do what works best for you and your team. Extremely practical, and the approach I personally follow.

This won’t be a detailed post on every possible topic on tests and testing in Object-oriented Programming (OOP). There are many books about that already. Instead, this article will cover the basics of testing, so you understand how and why we test, and you can adapt it to your own needs.

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A fast, flexible Tableau Connector for FileMaker

Building a custom Tableau® Connector for Claris® FileMaker® enables faster, more reliable and more flexible connections between Tableau and FileMaker datasources, compared with the legacy Web Data Connector.

For a number of Beezwax client projects, we’ve installed and deployed a Tableau Connector (aka “TACO”) for FileMaker. The TACO was built using the Tableau Connector SDK (provided by Tableau) to connect to datasources on FileMaker Server. The TACO method uses JDBC rather than the FileMaker Data API for the connection between FileMaker and Tableau, and in our testing the performance of data extracts was up to 10 times faster.

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