POLYTROPE Services: Coaching

 

  

Trying to learn database design and development with FileMaker Pro? Started a project in FileMaker that you need some help with? Personal coaching from FileMaker Pro 8 certified developer William Porter may be precisely what you need.

Coaching vs training

Personal FileMaker coaching gives you help that is focused on the problems that you are trying to solve. Most conventional training programs offer a standardized and very basic curriculum. If you have any experience with FileMaker at all, some of the things covered in a standard training course may already be familiar to you, and others may not be important to you.

If you have a specific project in mind and you are willing to do it yourself as much as possible, we can help you analyze the project, model your data, and get started developing. Along the way, we draw upon our own experience as developers to anticipate problems and discuss them with you before they arise. We digress to discuss general principles. The result is that you get the project done better than you probably would have had you worked entirely on your own, and you learn a great deal along the way.

The topics we cover are flexible, but not free form. William Porter will meet once with you (in person or by phone) to become familiar with your project and also to assess your level of FileMaker knowledge. He will then prepare a brief curriculum specifically for you. This curriculum will act as a rough guide for future coaching sessions. When you begin a coaching arrangement, you will usually be asked to step back briefly from your project and spend a little time learning some important general principles before getting back to work.

In coaching, three large areas are emphasized:

  1. Data modeling or 'normalization'. This is first of all how you structure your data and answers questions like how many data tables do you need, what fields should go into each table, and how will you relate the tables. But when dealing with FileMaker Pro, data modeling shades very quickly into managing the FileMaker "relationship graph". William Porter will explain the problems inherent in the relationship graph and suggest a solid, easy-to-understand way to deal with them.
  2. User interface design. In its broadest sense, the "user interface" is everything that the end-user of your database sees: all your layouts, including the fields, portals, buttons, etc. It also includes menu commands, login, even problems arising from the sharing of databases. In the long run, user interface design is the hardest part of developing a database system that works.
  3. Programming problems. This covers everything else. The term "programming" may not apply to FileMaker Pro work in a conventional sense, but good FileMaker developers learn to think like programmers. This means learning how to write scripts that work to process data or produce reports. It also means learning to think about the workflow logic of your database.

Even if your needs are more general, we'll make an effort to determine what level of knowledge you are starting out with; we will then build on your strengths and make a special effort to address your weaknesses. Finally, we will make sure that, along the way, you learn the WHY as well as the HOW, so that when your contact with us is over, you have a better idea how to solve your own problems in the future.

If you are a complete novice to FileMaker Pro, don't have a specific project in mind, and would simply like to learn about FileMaker generally, then you are a good candidate for conventional training, and we can make an excellent recommendation in this regard.

Scheduling

Typically, coaching sessions last only 60 or 90 minutes. Although you are welcome to contact William Porter by phone or email with a question, coaching sessions are typically scheduled in advance. Also, you will usually only have two or three hours of coaching a week.

For more information, write directly to William Porter: wp-at-polytrope-dot-com.

 
this page last modified: 7-May-03 11:50 AM July 30, 2007