Using The RIght Tool (Without Becoming One)

WOW. Who knew one little blog post could generate so much mail! =)

It was great hearing from some long-time (and long-time-no-talk-to) FileMaker friends from the past - and it was also great (and somewhat surprising - in a good way) to hear from so many of my Servoy friends about their concern that I "have dumped Servoy".

"Dumped Servoy?" WTF??

NOTHING could be farther from the truth! In fact, I'm working in collaboration with Scott Butler and his company iTech Professionals to create an entire video training site and Servoy CERTIFICATION Program! The project is at Servoy University.com - and we're really excited about it!

I'm very pleased and touched that so many of you folks have reached out to re-connect, to voice your concerns and to lend support.

Just to clear up any confusion - my position today is the same as my position has been for the past 15 years…

...wait for it…

USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB. (period!)

For a long time in my past I had only a single tool in my professional toolbelt: FileMaker. When you have only a single tool (and know it inside out, frontward and backward) - let's call it my "hammer" - then you tend to see everything as a nail. Every customer. Every job. Every opportunity.

There are lots of people (and I was one of the chief instigators) who did almost un-holy things with FIleMaker - and came up with some of the most outlandish work-arounds known to human kind in order to justify the (wrong) position that "FileMaker can do anything."

While it's technically true that you can FORCE FileMaker into SIMULATING almost anything you can think of or do in other tools - the fact of the matter remains that you should use FileMaker when the situation (and customer and budget and timeframe) are a good match for that particular tool.

It's exactly the same for Servoy.

Just to BE CLEAR on what I think of Servoy:

Servoy is an absolutely stunning piece of software that I personally (along with Jan Aleman, Jan Blok, Johan Compagner, Sebastiaan van Erk, Maarten Berkenbosch, Yvo Boom and Andy Rooswinkel) spent many fun, hard, exciting, bloody, glorious years turning a lump of clay in a hotel room demo into a "proper", profitable company with offices all over the world. It's probably one of the best/hardest ventures that I have been involved with in all my years in business. I believe that Servoy's rapid development, single code-base deployment to native and web, platform independence and NOW even open-source to boot - is absolutely one of THE best tools (if not THE best!) for creating GUIs into SQL databases on the market today.

The reason that I'm "officially" adding FileMaker BACK into my toolbelt - is because I don't want to fall back into the same position as I was back in "early" FIleMaker-only days - I don't want to see everything as a (bigger and more powerful and cooler) nail.

I DO appreciate your thoughts and suggestions!

(Feel free to get in touch if you want to express your opinions, have suggestions - and DEFINITELY get in touch if you have customer leads and paying work - in either tool)…