Senior FileMaker / Claris developer · 10+ years
I connect FileMaker to the rest of your business, rescue and modernize the solutions you can't afford to lose, and migrate you to tools you fully own — without breaking the workflows your team relies on every day.
Fixed-price by deliverable. No hourly timesheets — you know the cost up front.
Connect FileMaker to the rest of your stack — REST/JSON APIs, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, QuickBooks, and web services. I was wrapping ExecuteSQL in custom functions and hand-rolling JSON API calls back when it still took a plugin.
Inherited an undocumented solution? I diagnose what's slow or fragile, finish stalled builds, and document the systems nobody on staff can fully explain anymore — so your business isn't one departure away from a crisis.
When per-user licensing, integration limits, or key-person risk stop making sense, I map your real business logic and move you to the right stack — PostgreSQL and a web front end, Airtable, Retool — without losing what works.
The best place to start
A fixed-fee, roughly one-week review that tells you exactly what you have, what it's costing you, and your real options — a decision document you can act on with anyone.
With modern tooling, the build is the fast part. Understanding exactly what your system does — and why — is the work that actually protects you. I pick the tool that fits the job, not the one I'm trying to sell. Every engagement is fixed-price by deliverable, so there are no surprise invoices and no hourly clock.
A residence-life system that replaced spreadsheets and paper for a university housing office. Pulled live student data from an Oracle-based SIS, tracked occupancy and room assignments with real-time dashboards, and put mobile tools in staff hands — iPhone lookups by scanned student-ID barcode, iPad room inspections, and paperless damage billing.
Bridged FileMaker with outside systems: a Basecamp API integration syncing projects and to-dos across platforms, and a FileMaker front end over SQL Server for an enterprise incident-reporting database — plus custom functions that let non-developers build natural-language ExecuteSQL queries safely.
An authored tutorial and demo file showing an efficient master-detail interface using a "List Of" summary field, HTML, and the FMP URI scheme — no extra table occurrences or virtual lists required. Read it →
I'm RJ Carroll — a FileMaker/Claris developer with more than a decade of building, integrating, and rescuing custom database systems, including work as a developer at eXcelisys. I came up the way most FileMaker developers do: solving a real problem in my own job (running university housing operations), then going deeper as the work demanded. That path is my advantage — I understand both the citizen-developer mindset that built your system and the modern, extensible tools that can replace it.
I know higher education especially well — Banner/Ellucian, Oracle SIS, residence life, and the compliance landscape around student data — alongside manufacturing, healthcare, and tourism. FileMaker Certified Developer (v12–16); M.A. and B.A. from West Virginia University. I run my practice under Robot Lantern LLC.
Tell me what you have and what's hurting. I'll tell you straight whether it's worth keeping, extending, or replacing.