Thirty years in FileMaker. One year ago, I started wiring it to Claude.

I started building in FileMaker in 1995, in my dad's family lawn-care business. The first system tracked customers and routes. Thirty years later, that same business is still running on a FileMaker system I extended every year — and the system has accumulated the kind of working knowledge you can't rebuild from scratch.

For most of those years, my career sat one foot inside FileMaker and one foot outside it: building systems for SMBs across Western Pennsylvania, taking on side work in print and graphic design, and occasionally trying to convince clients that the system holding their business together was worth investing in rather than replacing wholesale. That argument got easier when Claude showed up.

In 2025 the equation changed. I could suddenly ship features in a week that would have taken a quarter. I could let the owner edit the rules instead of bothering me about thresholds. The dad-storm story on the case-study page is real — it taught me that adoption is its own engineering problem, separate from correctness. That lesson is now embedded in everything I ship.

What I'm doing now: productizing the methodology so other FileMaker developers can use it on their client work, and taking on a small number of done-for-you engagements with SMB owners whose systems deserve a modernization that doesn't throw away three decades of business logic.

Based in the Pittsburgh area. Available for remote work across the US. Best way to reach me is the contact page or LinkedIn.