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The race is over, and the 328 balloons have ‘landed’!

Over the past two weeks, FME users from around the globe took to the virtual skies in our 12 Days of FME Contest. Pilots navigated their virtual hot air balloons in an epic journey powered by FME Flow - racing for distance, speed, and more.

Now, it’s time to announce the winners!

Top Point Scorer: With an impressive 330 points, Team Cloudchaser (​@holdsy) takes the top spot and wins a stunning Mova Globe!

Second Place: With 308 points, Team Community Cats (​@cmkenned7) claims second place and also wins a Mova Globe.

Furthest Distance: Team Boskalis (​@nielsgerrits) travelled the furthest distance of 34,901.9 km and wins a $50 Amazon gift card.

Fastest Balloon: Team Jessica (​@jessicap) travelled at the fastest speed of 374.6 kph and wins a $50 Amazon gift card.

Country Flyovers: Flying over an impressive 32 countries, Team CloudConnector (​@ulfme) takes the prize for most countries crossed and wins a $50 Amazon gift card.

Safe Office: Team SwanAbout (​@df_cos )flew so close to the Safe Software office in Surrey, British Columbia, we almost saw their balloon from our windows! They’ve earned a $50 FME swag prize pack.

Airport Flyovers: Team Rocket (​@jonas_nelson) flew over an impressive 33 airports, earning them the unique distinction of our consolation prize! They’ll take home a $50 FME swag prize pack.

FME Data Visualization: User ​@niekb4 created the best visualization using data from the contest! They win a $100 Amazon gift card.

Find the full list of results here, including close shaves, most dateline crossings, and general awards. Keep your eye out for badge awards and sharing of the contest code and workspaces in the new year!

Other Fun Stats From the 12 Days of FME

  • Total number of participants: 328
  • Number of simulated positions: 333,752
  • Number of commands issued: 13,266
  • FME workspaces used: 62
  • Total FME Flow jobs run: 320,291

Short Survey
We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a couple minutes to complete our short survey about the 12 Days of FME. Your feedback is invaluable and will help us improve future community events!

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the 12 Days of FME Contest - one of our most popular virtual community events to date! 

A special shoutout to FME Evangelist ​@mark2atsafe for his incredible work creating, building, and managing the contest.

Until next time! Happy Holidays.

Cheers,
The Safe Community Team

Congratulations to everyone, especially ​@niekb4 for winning the visualization contest.

Thank you! I really enjoyed participating in the contest. Thanks ​@mark2atsafe and team at Safe for organizing the event!

Congratulations to all winners!

And many thanks to ​@mark2atsafe for all the work that made this event possible!

Thank you to all of the Safe Team who developed and worked behind the scenes in the 12 Days of FME competition, especially Danielle and Mark. Well done to all the other prize and badge winners. A huge thank you to all the competitors who made 12 Days of FME 2024 very exciting to be part of.

I enjoyed following my balloon, Cloudchaser, across the globe. Checking in on my balloon, plotting its course when possible, and racing against the rest of the FME community was a thrill. I hope you all enjoyed following your own balloons as well.

On my travels, I was extremely lucky to catch the right winds at the right times to plan a race strategy, but I also managed to escape some airport collisions with some very early alarm calls. It wasn’t all plain drifting and sailing, which I initially thought this competition might be. I quickly learned it was going to be much more involved, but it was all very engaging racing across the world.

If you look closer at the adventures of Cloudchaser, especially through India, you'll see that at one point I had dropped down the leaderboard quite a bit as others raced ahead. I had to go slowly backwards west to escape an airport, doing a nice little loop, and I almost got stuck in the Himalayan Mountains soon after.

I think living the adventure in real-time added a lot to the whole experience. However, losing 5 points for hitting airports was the stuff of nightmares. It was rather a cruelly designed scoring system, but again, that helped give the competition its meaningful edge.

Overall, it just goes to show how transformative FME can be. With a little effort and good design, powerful workspaces can be created.

I look forward to the 12 Days of FME 2025, as well as future blogs and webinars on how the 12 Days of FME 2024 was created and hosted.
 

Wishing all the FME Community happy holidays.

Andrew H

 

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