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June 4-5, 2026

Toronto Hilton

Get Ready to Level Up!

Get Your Early-Bird Seat Now - $899 CAD
A focused conference for FileMaker developers who want to build better.
Elevate FM brings experienced developers together for two days of practical insight and meaningful connection.
This isn’t about trends or theory. It’s about refining how you think, how you design, and how you build.

Over two focused days in Toronto, you’ll step back from day-to-day delivery and gain fresh perspective on your work. You’ll return with clearer standards, better decisions, and renewed momentum.

Refine Your Development

• Control scope and reduce rework
• Debug faster with better visibility
• Build cleaner architecture that scales
• Use AI to think through UX decisions
• Improve client conversations and positioning
• Write code that’s easier to maintain and trust

Seats Are Limited

Early-bird pricing applies to the first 30 registrations.
After that, the price increases to $1,149 CAD.
Location

Hilton Toronto

Governor General Room
2nd Floor
145 Richmond St West,
Toronto, ON M5H 2L2, Canada

Located in downtown Toronto, the Hilton Toronto is next to the Osgoode subway station. The hotel is within 10 minutes’ walk of Union Station, CN Tower, Royal Ontario Museum, and CF Toronto Eaton Centre.
Using public transit, St. Lawrence Market, Rogers Centre, and the Distillery District are 15 to 20 minutes away. The indoor-outdoor pool is open all year.

Accommodation

We don't have a dedicated room block at the host hotel, but you can get a 10% discount off regular rates using this link.

You can also check out the nearby Sheraton Center hotel.

Getting Here

Billy Bishop Airport (YTZ)
2 Eireann Quay, Toronto, ON M5V 2R9

Conveniently located on Toronto Island, and just minutes from downtown by taxi or public transit, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport offers service to more than 20 cities in Canada and the U.S.
It’s located about 30 minutes from the Toronto Hilton by public transit.
Learn More
Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ)
6301 Silver Dart Dr, Mississauga, ON L5P 1B2

Located about 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) northwest of downtown Toronto, Toronto Pearson International Airport is Canada’s largest and busiest airport, serving as a major hub for both domestic and international flights.
Visitors can easily access the city by public transit, taxis, or rental cars. The UP Express rail link service takes visitors from Pearson Airport to Union Station in about 30 minutes.
Learn More
Union Station Toronto
65 Front St W, Toronto, ON M5J 1E6

Union Station railway hub is located in downtown Toronto, on the south side of the block bounded by Bay Street and York Street.
It’s about 750m walking distance from the Hilton Toronto conference venue, or take the Yonge-University subway line from Union to Osgoode station.
Learn More
Schedule

June 4 - 5, 2026

8:00AM - 5:00PM

What’s Included

  • Two full days of focused conference programming
  • 14 curated sessions across development, design, and strategy
  • Daily breakfast, lunch, and coffee breaks
  • Welcome reception with speakers and attendees
Day 1 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Breakfast and Registration
Day 1 - 9:00 AM - 9:45 AM
Session 1
Day 1 - 9:45 AM - 10:30 AM
Session 2
Day 1 - 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Coffee Break
Day 1 - 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
Session 3
Day 1 - 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Session 4
Day 1 - 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Lunch Break
Day 1 - 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Session 5
Day 1 - 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM
Session 6
Day 1 - 3:15 PM - 3:45 PM
Coffee Break
Day 1 - 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM
Session 7
Day 1 - Evening (Exact time & place TBD)
Welcome Reception
Day 2 - 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
Breakfast
Day 2 - 9:00 AM - 9:45 AM
Session 1
Day 2 - 9:45 AM - 10:30 AM
Session 2
Day 2 - 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Coffee Break
Day 2 - 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
Session 3
Day 2 - 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Session 4
Day 2 - 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Lunch Break
Day 2 - 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Session 5
Day 2 - 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM
Session 6
Day 2 - 3:15 PM - 3:45 PM
Coffee Break
Day 2 - 3:45 PM - 4:30 PM
Session 7
Day 2 - 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Closing Session

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Speakers
Sponsors
FM Design University logo
FM Design University empowers FileMaker developers to create polished, user-friendly apps that clients love.
With over 25 years of expertise, founder Alexis Allen leads courses like The UX Design Workshop, combining practical UX/UI strategies with platform-specific insights.
 Our mission is to transform your approach to app design, saving you time while delivering exceptional results​​​.

 Explore our free resources by clicking here.
Skeleton Key is a Claris Platinum Partner with over 20 years of experience in FileMaker development.
We help businesses, educators, and local governments replace outdated software and workflows with custom solutions.
We're proud to support this growing community of innovative problem solvers!

 Visit Website
Skeleton Key logo

Why Sponsor?

Elevate FM is a focused, single-track conference for professionals who care deeply about quality, best practices, and building better FileMaker solutions.

When you sponsor, you’re not competing for attention, you’re aligned with a community that values expertise and trust.

Plus, your sponsorship directly helps sustain and grow the FileMaker developer community in Canada.

By sponsoring, you’re helping strengthen a local, professional community that builds and supports FileMaker solutions across organizations nationwide and beyond.

Sponsorship Benefits

  • Prominent logo placement across conference materials and the Elevate FM website
  • Direct link to your company or product from the event website
  • Exposure through pre-conference email campaigns and social media promotions sent to a highly targeted FileMaker audience
  • Opportunity to include branded materials or offers in attendee gift bags
  • Opportunity to display banners or other branded materials in shared conference areas during the event (subject to venue guidelines)
  • Verbal recognition during opening and/or closing sessions, reinforcing your support of the community.
Support Elevate FM
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Charlie Bailey

Charlie Bailey

Codence

Project Management with an AI Assistant: A Tech Lead's Guide to Claude Code

This presentation explores how Claude Code can transform project management for software development projects. We’ll examine how leveraging an AI assistant can enhance the project planning, documentation, development planning, and team coordination within your FileMaker projects. We will explore requirements gathering, rapid prototyping, technical specifications, milestone planning, testing, and documentation.

About Charlie

Charlie has been developing and managing FileMaker projects since 1999, with deep experience in technical leadership, the vertical solution space, and custom development. As a technical leader, Charlie focuses on bridging the gap between business requirements and technical implementation, ensuring development teams deliver solutions that truly serve their clients’ needs.

With over 25 years of experience managing complex FileMaker projects, Charlie brings practical insights into modern development workflows, project management methodologies, and the evolving role of AI assistance in software development. Charlie has actively integrated AI assistants into most aspects of his daily work functions, from requirements gathering and documentation to code development and team coordination.

Beyond his professional work, he is an active outdoor enthusiast and community leader. He is the former president of his local cycling club, where he enjoys gravel, road, and mountain biking. Charlie is also a competitive sailor, a certified alpine ski instructor, and an avid hiker. Recently, Charlie achieved the distinction of completing all 46 High Peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains—summiting every peak over 4,000 feet in the iconic mountain range.

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Jeremy Brown

Jeremy Brown

Integrating Magic

JavaScript in FileMaker is Better than Ever

The Web Viewer has been part of FileMaker for over 20 years, but in recent versions it has evolved into a genuinely powerful, first-class object.

In this session, you’ll take a practical look at what the Web Viewer can really do today—from writing JavaScript that runs inside it to building interactive widgets that communicate cleanly with the rest of the FileMaker platform.

You’ll leave with a clear understanding of how to structure and integrate JavaScript in FileMaker, along with concrete examples of data-driven interactions that go far beyond static web content.

You’ll be inspired by what the Web Viewer can do to bring joy and interactivity to your client’s experience—and you’ll learn how to code for it to create those delightful, data-driven interactions.

About Jeremy

After being a teacher of 15 years and working with various FileMaker Platinum Partner shops for 8 years, Jeremy now works for himself as Integrating Magic LLC. He has focused his time in the last four years on the FileMaker Web Viewer, building JS widgets for other developers and training them how to do this on their own.

In the JS in FM community, Jeremy explores, discusses, and learns with others how to best use JavaScript in FileMaker. He also partners with developer shops to work as a contractor in general FileMaker development, integrations, and web development.

When not working, he enjoys the Florida USA sun with his family–made up of a spouse and two dogs–and gets away to Walt Disney World when he can.

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Charles Delfs

Charles Delfs

Delfs’ Engineering

Elevating FileMaker Development: The Power of API-First Design

In this session, we’ll explore the transformative potential of API-first design for FileMaker developers. Drawing from years of experience implementing this approach in large-scale applications, we’ll dive into how this design pattern can reshape your development process and elevate the quality of your FileMaker solutions.

API-first design isn’t just a buzzword—it represents a fundamental shift in how we approach FileMaker development. We’ll discuss the core principles of this methodology and examine how designing and defining APIs up front can lead to clearer system boundaries, more predictable behaviour, and solutions that are easier to extend and maintain over time.

By the end of the session, attendees will have a clearer understanding of how API-first thinking can support more scalable, adaptable FileMaker solutions, and how applying these principles can lead to cleaner architecture and fewer downstream headaches in real-world projects.

About Charles

Charles Delfs is the founder of Delfs’ Engineering and FM BetterForms, where he leads a talented team making web development accessible to FileMaker developers worldwide. An electrical engineer by training with over 40 years of programming experience, Charles is known throughout the FileMaker community for his philosophy of finding “elegant solutions” to complex problems.

He’s a sought-after speaker at events like CQDF and dotfmp, and hosts the popular ‘Friday Live’ meetup where he connects with developers and shares knowledge. Based in Toronto, Charles balances his technical leadership with martial arts instruction and dirt bike riding.

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Weihao Ding

Weihao Ding

Direct Impact Solutions

What Magic: The Gathering Taught Me About Controlling Project Scope

Struggling to keep project scope under control? This session explores practical techniques for cutting and shrinking user stories—drawn from lessons learned through playing Magic: The Gathering.

Using deck-building as a lens, you’ll learn how to make tough decisions about what stays and what goes, how to creatively shrink stories without losing their essence, and how to ensure your trimmed-down scope still delivers maximum ROI.

This session directly addresses one of the most common challenges in FileMaker development: scope creep, which leads to delayed projects, bloated solutions, and misaligned deliverables.

By teaching practical techniques for cutting and shrinking user stories while maintaining value alignment, attendees will walk away with concrete strategies for building leaner, more focused FileMaker apps that deliver maximum ROI faster—resulting in higher-quality apps, fewer delays, and a more efficient development process.

About Weihao

With an Agile mindset, low-code technologies, and a value-driven approach, Weihao has successfully delivered numerous innovative business solutions since 2014. Currently, he serves as the Director of Quality and Innovation at Direct Impact Solutions (DIS), using his digital transformation and continuous improvement expertise to improve DIS’ operational maturity and maximize client success.

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Doug Gardner

Doug Gardner

Exoteric

Getting Better: A Deliberate Approach to Developer Growth

You’re a good developer—but you’re a work in progress. Or at least, you could be.

This session starts from the idea that striving to be better (and we’ll unpack what “better” actually means) makes work more enjoyable, even exciting, and makes the practice of development more fulfilling over time.

Taking a philosophical approach that leads to concrete outcomes, we’ll explore how to navigate the expanding Claris platform with a deliberate focus on ourselves as developers.

Topics include building a personal priority stack, understanding the real meaning of decision-making, discipline versus habit, and why criticism—and the signals our clients send—is essential to growth.

You’ll leave this session with concrete steps to improve how you work, along with the inspiration to define a new, elevated normal.

About Doug

Doug Gardner is the founder of Exoteric Inc., a Toronto-based FileMaker Platinum Partner with clients across Canada and the United States. While working on his Ph.D. at York University in Toronto he lectured in front of audiences large and small. Doug has worked as a FileMaker developer for the past 25 years and has been a frequent FileMaker developer conference and CQDF Montreal speaker.

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Pearson Huguenin

Pearson Huguenin

Delfs’ Engineering

Design With AI, Not By AI

AI is great at generating code, but it’s just as powerful as a design thinking partner. In this session, we’ll use AI to turn a vague app idea into a clear UX structure.

We’ll go from a rough problem statement to page layouts, user flows, and UI decisions, showing how developers can use AI to ask better design questions, explore options, and avoid common UX pitfalls without having to become designers.

This session will be about using AI to think through UX faster and more intentionally, rather than letting AI design the whole app.

This session raises the standard of FileMaker development by teaching developers how to use AI as a thinking partner rather than a decision-maker. It accelerates development by helping teams explore UX/UI directions quickly while still applying critical judgment to build better apps.

About Pearson

Pearson Huguenin leads the UX and Design department at Delfs’ Engineering, creator of FM BetterForms, a web application builder for FileMaker developers. With hundreds of apps, features, and widgets designed, Pearson specializes in transforming complex business requirements into intuitive, user-friendly interfaces. He has designed software for clients across a wide range of industries, including healthcare, agriculture, and e-commerce.

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Heather McCue

Heather McCue

Harmonic Data

From User Stories to QA: Managing Design Thinking in Real Projects

Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to optimizing customer experiences that deliver both quality and value, which is why many teams are working to incorporate its principles into their projects and development processes.

Still, no matter how strongly these concepts resonate, implementing and sustaining change is easier said than done. This session examines a solution built to manage user-centred project work—from agreed-upon User Stories through to resulting features and QA test plans.

Drawing on real experience adopting Design Thinking mindsets and behaviours, attendees will see how this approach can improve communication and collaboration, focus scope, prioritize outcomes, and validate quality across a project.

By reviewing an internal tool that supports the full development lifecycle, participants will leave with a practical model for keeping user stories, development work, and testing aligned—so Design Thinking becomes something they actively use, not just something they agree with.

About Heather

Heather’s been working with FileMaker for over three decades, starting her own consultancy in 1999 before most people knew what custom databases could do. A few years in, she began collaborating with Harmonic on large projects, and her approach was such a natural fit that she was invited to relocate from North Carolina and join the team. That was 21 years ago, and the FileMaker community has been benefiting from her presentations and expertise ever since.

Heather’s title at Harmonic is simply ‘Expert’—intentionally vague because it covers so many roles. She serves as teammate, FileMaker architect, and mentor to developers on the Low Code team, and with her UX certification from SMU, she also works closely with the Design team. When someone needs to know if something’s possible in FileMaker, they ask Heather.

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Robert Naud

Robert Naud

Accolade Plus Accolade

Master Custom Logging: Debug Faster and Understand What Really Happened

Are you spending hours stepping through scripts line by line? Do your users report unexpected behaviour that you can never reproduce? While the Script Debugger and Data Viewer are valuable allies, they can also devour precious time.

Who hasn’t wished they could see exactly what happened during the execution of a problematic script—without having to replay every step? Did a user take one action or another? Did a script run as expected, or quietly fail along the way?

This is where custom logging comes in. Custom logging provides a strategic way to diagnose, understand, and improve your FileMaker solutions by capturing meaningful information as your scripts run.

This session will provide insights and a demonstration file designed to change how you debug and develop. We’ll cover the big themes of effective logging: what to log, where it belongs, when it should run, how to structure it, and—if you still need convincing—why it’s worth the effort.

The direct benefits include a dramatic reduction in debugging time and improved overall solution quality.

You’ll leave with practical recipes and tools you can apply immediately, giving you clearer visibility into real-world behaviour and far less time spent chasing hard-to-reproduce issues in FileMaker.

About Robert

Robert Naud is a FileMaker Certified Developer and Claris MVP with over two decades of experience in the Claris ecosystem. In 2019, he founded Accolade Plus Accolade, building on years of work with leading Claris Platinum Partners on projects across Canada and the United States.

Robert is equally invested in the Claris community — co-founding Le Point d’Arrêt, a prominent French-language forum, leading a monthly user group connecting developers across Quebec and Europe, and contributing to various community initiatives. His dedication was recognized at the 2024 Claris Excellence Awards, where he received the Community Leader of the Year award.

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Josh Ormond

Josh Ormond

Iozax

Coding with Clarity: The Role of Expressiveness

Join Josh as he dives into the art—and opinions—of writing clear code, with a focus on the vital role expressiveness plays in day-to-day development work. This session explores practical ways to improve code readability, maintainability, and shared understanding using simple, high-impact concepts you can apply immediately to your existing projects.

Josh will walk through how expressive naming, structure, and encapsulation help reduce cognitive load, speed up development, and make code easier to reason about when you revisit it later or troubleshoot bugs. You’ll also look at how encapsulating logic inside clearly named functions, scripts, or layout objects leads to more robust code with fewer errors.

Along the way, he’ll discuss how to strike the right balance—writing code that is readable and elegant without becoming over-engineered—and how to recognize when expressiveness may have gone too far.

You’ll walk away with clearer patterns for structuring and naming code, a better shared vocabulary for discussing code quality, and practical techniques for writing code that’s easier to build, maintain, and trust over time.

About Josh

Josh is a seasoned developer and FileMaker community advocate from Rochester, NY, with two decades of experience creating elegant digital solutions. His journey began 20 years ago with his first custom application, transforming a paper-based classified ad department into a streamlined digital workflow. As founder of Iozax, LLC, Josh currently partners with CityTech Solutions to deliver comprehensive business applications. His development philosophy centers on writing clear, expressive code that not only solves immediate problems but creates lasting organizational value through thoughtful database design and user-focused functionality.

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Lauren Purcell

Lauren Purcell

BlueBird Custom Software

FileMaker vs. The Competition: Winning Against Today’s Top Alternatives

Claris FileMaker is known for its power and versatility—but how does it truly compare to today’s leading alternatives? This session breaks down the practical differences between FileMaker and competing platforms using clear comparison tables and simple reframing lines you can immediately apply in real conversations. Attendees will gain practical tools to confidently position FileMaker, even when speaking with organizations that have never heard of the platform or are considering other solutions.

We’ll also tackle one of the biggest challenges in solution selling: inaction. You’ll learn ten proven strategies to guide sales discussions, build trust, and help clients recognize when FileMaker is the right fit for their needs.

Walk away prepared to win more opportunities with proven positioning techniques, competitive insights, and mindset shifts that strengthen your confidence in presenting and promoting Claris FileMaker.

About Lauren

Lauren Purcell is the founder of BlueBird Custom Software, where she guides businesses in discovering Claris FileMaker as a fast, powerful platform for custom automation. Passionate about eliminating tedious tasks, Lauren empowers clients—from Alaska to the Caribbean and everywhere in between—to focus their time on meaningful, high-value work. She lives in Vermont with her family, embracing the outdoors, exploration, and community connection.

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John Renfrew

John Renfrew

attitude

Modernizing Legacy Files Without a Full Rewrite

At least once in our development career, we’re presented with a big old dog of a file that just does not perform very well. It shows clear signs of old age, with working practices and architecture from another era, and often comes with both performance and design issues.

This session looks at strategies for approaching these legacy files when the answer is *not* a full rebuild. We’ll cover what to look out for when analyzing an existing system, common red flags, a checklist for actions on scripts, layouts, and other artefacts, leading to ways of adding new features from the outside without destabilizing what’s already there.

The focus is on understanding the current state of the solution so you can decide what to tackle first, where the quick wins are, and how to prioritize work in a way that benefits the customer. You’ll leave with practical pointers for improving aging FileMaker files, listening carefully to client needs, and making meaningful improvements that make you look heroic—without having to start over.

About John

Originally trained as a kindergarten teacher, John has had a working career that encompasses the music and live events industries, presentation and graphic design, and spanned the globe. His FileMaker knowledge has come from over 30 years of using this toolbox to solve business management and logistics challenges, initially just for his own enterprise, but for the last 15 of those for others, as a Claris Partner.

Much of his work is now focused on projects in the higher education space, and statutory reporting in the UK. He was an early adopter of OData within the platform, and regularly shares his knowledge within the wider community.

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Mark Richman

Mark Richman

Skeleton Key

Not Every Problem Needs Solving: A Framework for Evaluating Business Challenges

Every business faces challenges: expenses reducing profitability, inefficient workflows impacting productivity, obstacles to growth, and variables introducing risk. Knowing which issues to tackle first—or at all—can be paralyzing.

This session explores a model for identifying which problems are worth solving, in what order, and why some may never warrant the effort.

The focus is on conversations that precede code creation, data examination, or solution research—teaching you to have ‘value conversations’ with prospects and clients that identify what‘s working, what‘s not, and how to quantify improvement value.

This matters for three reasons: solving the right problems, winning business, and creating truly valuable apps. This framework helps you avoid wasting effort on issues that may never warrant the investment, while ensuring you tackle challenges that deliver real value on the client’s terms.

About Mark

Mark is the Founder & CEO of Skeleton Key, a Claris Platinum Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He’s been helping clients, friends, and colleagues identify and solve the business problems worth solving for over 35 years.

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Ivica Sopkic

Ivica Sopkic

Figurus

Decoupling Reporting from FileMaker Layouts

Over the years, many tools and techniques have tried to replace spreadsheets for reporting — and yet they keep coming back, because they’re flexible, familiar, and genuinely enjoyable to work with.

In this session, I’ll share why I intentionally avoid building complex reporting and charting inside FileMaker, and instead treat Google Sheets and Google Looker Studio as a natural reporting layer. We’ll explore how this mindset shift supports fast iteration, evolving requirements, and better conversations around data, while allowing FileMaker to remain focused on what it does best.

This session offers permission to stop fighting spreadsheets and instead use them intentionally. By reframing reporting as exploration rather than a fixed feature, attendees will see how pairing FileMaker with tools like Google Sheets and Looker Studio often leads to better outcomes.

About Ivica

After years of managing complex projects and navigating chaotic workflows, Ivica developed a healthy skepticism for over-engineered systems. While FileMaker is a cornerstone of their toolkit, they believe the best solution is often the one that embraces how people actually work.

Ivica specializes in “intentional integration” using FileMaker for its strengths while leaning into the familiarity of tools like Google Sheets for reporting. They are dedicated to helping developers stop fighting spreadsheets and start using them as a competitive advantage for faster iteration and better data conversations.

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Jason Wood

Jason Wood

Define Database

Beyond Layout Mode – Next-Generation Document Output for FileMaker

What if your print designs and workflows were no longer limited by Layout Mode? By leveraging the power of the web, developers can create polished, highly dynamic document output that goes far beyond what traditional layouts can achieve.

This session demonstrates a practical approach to building web-driven document pipelines in FileMaker, including passing structured data to the Web Viewer, designing reusable document templates, and producing high-quality print and PDF output.

Attendees will gain inspiration, practical concepts, and a clear sense of the possibilities—along with concrete ideas they can explore in their own solutions.

About Jason

Jason Wood is Principal at Define Database, a Claris Partner based in Toronto. With more than 25 years of FileMaker experience, he has helped organizations of all sizes maximize the value of their solutions through thoughtful design and seamless integration with complementary technologies.

Driven by a passion for continuous learning, innovation, and knowledge sharing, Jason explores creative approaches to familiar challenges, encouraging developers to rethink assumptions and discover new possibilities for building richer, more capable FileMaker applications.

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Elevate FM 2026 – Toronto FileMaker Developer Conference

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