Some conferences you just attend. Others send you home with a head full of ideas, a phone full of photos and a list of people you want to write to upon return. EngageU 2026 was the second kind. For three days, from September 30 to October 2, 202 FileMaker people from 31 countries met in Malmö to learn from each other, discuss the best ways of doing things and, quite often, simply laugh together.

The numbers speak for themselves: 43 speakers and 42 sessions, most of them deeply technical. The first day also included five business-focused sessions, looking at FileMaker from the perspective of people who run companies and make decisions rather than write scripts. What the numbers do not show is the atmosphere. The hallways were never empty, conversations kept going long after the sessions ended, and you could clearly feel that the FileMaker community is facing the big changes brought by AI together, with curiosity rather than fear. A big thank you to Square Moon and Clickworks for making it all happen.

Five out of five

This was the fifth EngageU, and we are proud to have sponsored every single one of them. This year we brought 14 members of our team, which made Czechia the fourth largest country by number of attendees. For some of our colleagues it was the first chance to meet in person the people whose names they knew only from forums, blogs and session recordings, and to see how big and friendly the FileMaker community really is.

Two days in Malmö before the conference

We arrived three days ahead of the conference to spend two great days in Malmö together as a team. We walked the city, explored its parks, canals and neighborhoods, tasted the local food and simply enjoyed each other's company away from our desks.

To share our discoveries and the fun with everyone else, we turned some of our best photos into two photo quizzes for all conference attendees. If you have not tried them yet, you still can: check Malmö Under the Microscope and Beyond "One Day" in Malmö to see how well you know the city.

My two sessions

In FileMaker Performance Under the Microscope I answered the question many of us had been asking since the release: is FileMaker 2026 faster? Measured with a full BenchTest and an isolated calculation engine test, the short answer is that there is no meaningful difference yet. So I moved on to something with an even bigger impact: how often FileMaker evaluates our calculations. Displaying one ordinary layout took 901 evaluations, 549 of them unnecessary, and hovering over a field for five seconds triggered over 7,000 evaluations, mostly record-level privilege checks, tooltips and field entry conditions.

Vince Menanno pointed out during the session, that if we want Claris to change this, we need to be heard as a community. Just like you all helped me by voting for the faster calculation engine, don't hesitate to let Claris know that you care. That you want not only faster calculation engine, but also calculations to be evaluated only as often as necessary. That you want better tools to see what's happening, so that you can make better design decisions. 

But we do have things we can use to improve performance of our solutions today. I showed how to measure layout rendering reliably with an OnTimer trigger, how to find the slow objects by repeatedly removing half of them (binary splitting), and how to cache an expensive calculation so it runs at most once per second. The session also covered what FileMaker 2026 does bring, from Go to List of Records to WebP containers that saved 3.57 GB in a single database and multiple scripting engine instances on the server. It closed with a real-world case: in an ERP system that had already been optimized several times, one find request went from 117 seconds to 2 seconds, on average over 699 real runs.

In Beyond "One Day" in FileMaker I spoke to every developer who is the only person in their company who truly understands the system, and who has a list of improvements they plan to make "one day". I shared why postponing is usually a rational decision, and why that is exactly the reason it keeps happening. Through three real stories (a single developer, a development team, and a company with no developer at all), I showed what finally made the difference: a technical buddy, one technical person from outside your company, with a regular hour in your calendar and no need to be right. We also talked about keeping AI next to the conversation between people, not inside it, and about deciding for each capability separately, not for the whole platform at once, whether to keep, improve, extend or replace a part of the system, and whether it belongs inside, beside or outside FileMaker.

Thank you to everyone who came, asked questions and stopped me in the hallway afterwards. The handouts from both sessions are available for download: 10 FileMaker performance tips and Find yourself a technical buddy.

Our booth: software meets hardware

Between the sessions, you could find us at our booth in the exhibition area. This year we showed several integrations we have been working on recently, including barcode scanning, a thermal camera, speech-to-text transcription that runs privately on the device, without sending any audio to the cloud, and a WebDirect app inside a native app on iOS and Android. Many visitors stopped by to try the demos and to tell us about their own ideas, and we enjoyed every one of these conversations.

We also invited everyone to join our hardware integration contest. Anyone can submit an idea for connecting a piece of hardware with software, in FileMaker or any other platform. The winning idea will be developed by us for free and turned into reality. Do you have a real problem that the right hardware could solve? Submit your idea.

40 more sessions and two evenings to remember

Besides my two sessions, there were 40 other sessions, packed with valuable technical information shared by enthusiastic speakers, and our whole team came back with notes, ideas and things to try. Not surprisingly, AI was everywhere: many sessions were fully focused on it, and many more touched on it from different perspectives, from development practices to integrations to the future of our profession.

The evenings were just as good as the days. On the first evening we enjoyed a great fine dining experience, with excellent food and plenty of time to talk with people from all over the world. The next evening, the social event took us to Malmö Brewing Co & Taproom for local beer, good food and even more conversations. The night ended with two hours of karaoke, where some FileMaker developers proved that their talents go far beyond writing scripts.

But let our team members speak for themselves:

"Everyone in Malmö was amazing. Thank you for a wonderful time, both for work and relaxation." Seija

"We enjoyed meeting our worldwide FileMaker colleagues both in and out of the conference room and sharing these valuable moments with all the co-developers!" Martin

"We really enjoyed the well-organized conference, which was full of new information, and we also had time to meet colleagues informally in a great place." Tomáš

"We thank the organizers of the event for the shared evening moments which brought some of us closer together and made the following conference days even more entertaining." Karel

"Amazing and calm city, a great place for a conference, a fantastic group, and a terrific time with wonderful people, both during the conference and outside of it. So many unforgettable memories that I'm bringing back home with me. Thanks for everything! I'm already looking forward to the next EngageU!" Ondra Ch.

"Owing to its smooth organization and thought-provoking talks, the conference was a pleasant opportunity to discuss the future of FileMaker, AI, and software development in general." Ondra K.

"An enjoyable and enriching week that perfectly combined sightseeing with professional learning." Philip

See you in Antwerp

The next EngageU is coming back to Antwerp next year, and we are already looking forward to it. Thank you, Square Moon and Clickworks, for five great conferences, and thank you to all the speakers, sponsors and attendees who make EngageU what it is.

Let's stay in touch

If we met in Malmö, or if we did not meet but you wish we had, let's keep the conversation going. Subscribe to our newsletter for a monthly performance tip and news from 24U, or simply send me an email.

If you attended my sessions, I would love to hear from you. Did you count the evaluations on your slowest layout? Send me the number, or any other interesting benchmark you have measured. I collect them. And if the idea of a technical buddy sounds useful to you, let's talk about how to arrange one for you, someone to talk to regularly about the things you have been postponing to "one day". Schedule a call with me and let's find out how we can be useful to you.