Good morning! 🙂

I hope you have had a nice holiday season so far. Only New Year’s Eve left to go, from my narrow sociological and cultural perspective! What are you planning on doing for New Year’s Eve?? If you are near Jackson, Mississippi, please feel free to throw out some ideas. I would appreciate hearing about them.

So, I recently had some time away from my regular life to reflect on things and one of the things that popped into my head was how I would approach application development when I returned to my home. I found that I felt GREAT solace in the idea of going straight back to FileMaker, if it were still a thing, and then finally giving Python Django an honest shot for full-stack Web development on Linux.

I’d never really dived into Django although I’d used it several times. I couldn’t say I’d actually *built* something with Django but instead maintained or modified some Django sites. Remarkably, my exposure to it was so oblique, or maybe my head was just too full of other things going on so I couldn’t adequately appreciate it, that I never realized how awesome Django was/is as a rapid application development platform!!! For example, the fact that you get an “admin” interface (CRUD functionality is really what I’m going for here) right out of the box is fantastically amazing and exceptional in my experience. This seems to indicate that the development and design of Django has been pragmatic and reasonable which are the hallmarks of things that I like to use.

And about FileMaker. . . . FileMaker is, or was, a desktop database application. It was similar to Microsoft Access. FileMaker was my big introduction to software development. You could design an app within FileMaker and it would contain a database model, user interfaces, scripting capabilities, lots of data integrity functionality built-in, and the process was extremely user-friendly and GUI-driven; there was no coding required aside from the code the developer chose to write for enhanced functionality of the app. I found it extremely useful personally and professionally.

Now I’m thinking of trying to use FileMaker again, as both a Web application prototyping and wireframing tool, a tool for building one-off apps for myself that don’t need to be on the Web, and, once again, for professional development through my consulting services. For example, I could build a complex, data-driven application in a few days and hand it off to a contractor to replicate it in whichever stack might be called for. That seems very efficient!

So, I will move forward with this set of tools for now and see how it goes.