The future rarely arrives the way you expect it to.
When we chose Surviving the Future as the theme for this year’s FileMaker Week, I thought we were being provocative. Apparently, we were just a little early.
A few days ago, Ryan McCann announced that there will be no Claris developer conference in 2027. That makes two years in a row without Engage, and of course the community is murmuring. It would be strange if it wasn’t. For many of us Engage has been one of those fixed points in the FileMaker world for so long that its absence inevitably raises questions, especially when one missing year becomes two. Claris is giving up its biggest developer gathering at a moment when there seems to be more to discuss than we’ve had in years. FileMaker 2026 is out, engineering is already deep into agentic capabilities and new platform tooling, and Ryan describes a roadmap fuller than it has been for a long time.
In other words, Engage isn’t disappearing because nothing is happening. It’s disappearing, at least for another year, because too much is happening.
And this is where Surviving the Future came back into my head.
When we chose those words, we weren’t talking about FileMaker dying. Quite the opposite. We were looking at a platform that is changing quickly and wondering what that change means for the rest of us. If AI becomes part of how applications are built, what happens to the way we have been developing for years? If agents start doing things we used to consider development work, where does our value move? And if you are a company with a FileMaker system that has been quietly running your business for fifteen or twenty years, how do you know whether you should keep evolving it, radically rethink it, or finally let it go?
And perhaps this is why Ryan’s announcement feels so connected to all of this. Claris itself is making a choice about where to put its time and attention. Engage matters, but right now the platform matters more. I can understand that decision, even if I also understand why the community is uneasy about it.
There is another consequence, though. If there is no Engage in 2027, the regional conferences become more than the events we attend while waiting for the official one. They are where the community will meet, exchange what it has learned, challenge ideas, discover what other people are doing and, hopefully, come home with a few assumptions slightly damaged.
So choose your favourite one. Or choose one you have never been to. Travel, meet people you only know from a screen, sit next to someone who builds completely differently from you, ask questions, disagree, steal a good idea and give one back. We spend an extraordinary amount of time discussing the future of this platform online. Every now and then it is useful to put all those opinions in the same physical room.
The FMExchange program will be revealed very soon, and this year I want the fact that we are the last conference of the season to actually mean something. By November, FileMaker 2026 will have been in our hands for months. We will have seen the announcements, watched the demos, tested the new toys and probably formed a few strong opinions about them. Other conferences will have happened. People will have tried things in real projects, discovered what works and found out what sounded much better on a slide than it did on Monday morning.
And that is exactly where I want FMExchange to start.
Not from what is new, because by November most of it won’t be new anymore. We will have had time to use it, misuse it, change our minds about it and see what happens when new technology meets old applications, real users, budgets, deadlines and twenty years of decisions nobody remembers making.
Closing the conference season gives us a rather unusual opportunity: we can look back at what actually happened in 2026 before everyone starts telling us what will happen in 2027.
Some ideas will have survived the year. Some probably won’t have. And somewhere in between there will be the things we still haven’t figured out.
Those are probably the most interesting ones.
The FMExchange program is almost ready. There are still a few surprises to announce, a few experiments we want to try, and two days in Milan to compare notes before everyone heads into 2027.
No Claris Engage 2027 waiting for us on the other side this time.
So we’d better make those conversations count.
