Question of the Week: How did you first get into using FME? (Bingo Square 23)

When our director joined the branch, he brought a strong geospatial perspective and introduced us to FME. These were some of our earliest workflows: a lot of learning, trial and error, and figuring things out as we went.

I started out in the 2010s in natural resources - mineral exploration where GIS often starts with a small team managing large volumes of spatial data, often in MapInfo TAB format. As exploration programs expand, scientists, geologists, hydrogeologists, mine planning and environmental specialists all need access to the same authoritative spatial datasets, creating pressure to move beyond desktop-based files and into enterprise systems. 

Initially, FME was introduced as a practical way to automate the conversion of MapInfo datasets into Microsoft SQL Server Spatial. What began as a simple migration project quickly demonstrates broader value. The next phase saw the adoption of Esri Geodatabases to support enterprise GIS capabilities. FME was again used to bridge systems, migrating and synchronising spatial data from SQL Server into ArcGIS Enterprise geodatabases with domains, subtypes, relationships, and business rules.

Over time, FME has become embedded in almost all of my daily GIS operations. The platform enables repeatable ETL processes, quality assurance, change detection, and governance controls that allow many business units to access trusted spatial data

• I do topographic map data conversion, and I need to start building a geodatabase from DWG-format topographic maps.

By a colleague who showed me how easily and quickly we could convert coordinates from UTM to NTM. 😎 Since then, I’ve been using FME for everything. 😍

My colleagues and I knew about FME, but we needed a good reason to convince the boss to purchase FME. Once we had that reason, the purchase was arranged in no time.

Unfortunately, I don't remember that reason now...

When I started my work at the Municipality of Täby (19 years ago), a colleague showed me how to use FME to convert between national and local coordinate systems, and how to convert between different file formats. Little did I know then what FME was ACTUALLY capable of doing!

Had a course in FME while studying and then started using it at work

Learnt about FME during a work placement and enjoyed using it ever since. 😊

My previous job had some huge biodiversity net gain workspaces which i was introduced to! Been an advocate for its capabilities ever since!

Started at a new workplace where I inherited a lot of existing FME workspaces.  I thought, “Hmm, I better get up to speed with this quick smart!”  Thankfully I did, and it has helped greatly for dealing with various tasks, data issues and problems!

First heard of it when I was still attending university, fellow students recommended it for my master thesis, but I was like ‘I’ll rather do the whole thing in python’, which worked out, but in retrospective it would have been so much easier to simply listen.
Then I started my job and was put into a FME training session in my first week and my eyes were opened... 

The first time I heard about FME was through my then-boyfriend's internship. There was one of those classic GIS gurus there who had this magical software called FME that could automatically build seamless national map products from individual map sheets.

One of the challenges he was solving was that the map sheets were cartographically generalized. At the corners where four map sheets met, the same city name might appear on all four sheets, but on the merged map you only wanted it to appear once. And this FME thing could solve this automagically.

A little later, I realized that a few of my own colleagues were using the same software, but mainly for transforming data between file formats, converting coordinate systems, and moving data between different systems.

Now, almost 20 years later, I use FME every day. It turns out that transforming data, moving it between systems, and making things work together never go out of style. These days, I have a much better idea of what's happening behind the curtain, but it still feels a bit magical sometimes.

Back almost 7 years ago, I decided to make a career switch and applied for a role as a developer but nothing less than a GIS developer.  I read for 2 weeks about GIS, projection and software used in GIS.  Through the course of that new role, I developed a geocoder/reverse geocoder and started using FME to manipulate all the various type of data the cities had and needed to be injected into my Elasticsearch indexes.

Now, after another career switch, I have installed FME Flow numerous times for me and clients, developed workspaces, but still learning new stuff with FME! 

I got into FME by a course in college, however didn’t really start using it until my current job now! It’s been 4 years, and a lot of new skills!

It was Masters Remote Sensing course @ Högskolan i Gävle, Sweden 2016 where we were introduced to FME. It was incredibly difficult so wrap our heads around that the software is so powerful to manipulate geospacial data, but the viewer (Inspector) was a separate instance that had to be opened in a separate window. Once used to it, FME became a daily tool ever after.

I wish I could remember the first time I heard of FME. 
I may be mistaken but I think I heard or read that the mapimport/mapexport commands in map3d used a licensed portion of fme. This seems like it was 1998. After that I needed to dig deeper. I finally got my boss to buy it for me. Soon after I had a saying “I cannot work without all 3 tools in my tool belt” 

I use it all day; every day now. 
the screen shot is from a 2018 dwg to line crossings pnt data workspace. 

I started using FME in 2022 as it was part of my new Job. 

Its my favourite Software ever since.

Was introduced to FME ages ago in school, still don’t use it as much as I should or could...but slowly changing that...

was assigned a license at work, been a huge update to a lot of our work. Great tool and so happy I was chosen to help lead the charge with it

My first exposure to GIS was through using QGIS while studying architecture at university.

As a civil engineer, I frequently work with utility asset records, which started with ArcGIS Pro.

I was introduced to FME in 2020 and quickly took to its visual programming interface, which felt intuitive and familiar having learnt Grasshopper and Rhino at uni. Since then, it has become a core part of my everyday workflow. I recently became an FME Certified Professional and tinkering with FME Flow Apps to deliver accessible, self-service automations to the team at work.

EDIT: Subscribing to What’s Up Wednesday is the last community activity on the Bingo board. Let’s get there

I, like most, started ”using” FME way before I had it on my desktop. (Back then we had desktop 😂). FME is the ETL running in the background serving up data and slicing up orders. Answering emails and converting drawings into submissions. Clicking a button and having magic happen on the other side.

When did I start? In a Universe far far away when a CIO said "We need an ETL tool" and FME won the product testing competition.

15 years ago, it was part of the software used at my workplace, and it still is today.

My first first usage of FME dates back to January 2001, when I worked for a HFC/ Broadband Network Design Services Company in Atlanta, USA. Since FME CD used to come packed in a completely black coloured back embellished with the old FME logo, we used to call it the blackbox in our company. I think it was FME 2000 Build 422, if I remember correctly.

I ran a v7 dgn to MITAB conversion automated using the command line script to call a handwritten fme mapping file to convert 18,000+ v7 dgn files to MITAB files for New York area to create a GIS system out of the network engineering data in Focus 95 system.

The conversion was made to run overnight with a warning board on the desk that read “FME conversion in progress, do not switch of the PC”.

The next morning I rushed to the office quite early to check the status and was happy that the process  of 18,000+ v7 dgn files to MITAB files had finished successfully in about 8 hours.

The script also had a three stooges theme music to play, if at all the process finished successfully.

Not sure if someone heard that when FME finished the process sometime early morning as early as 3 AM!

Happy FME-ing :-)

SRG

For me, it happened in a few steps. I was first introduced to FME at university, but honestly, it was pretty high-level at the time (reprojection, format conversion, etc.). My first “real” experience with FME was at XEOS Imaging, a company working with airborne data acquisition (LiDAR and aerial imagery). FME was our go-to tool for working with large point clouds and aerial images. That’s where I really got hooked, and FME has pretty much followed me ever since!

I then brought it into my next job at an auto and home insurance company, where we used FME to process large customer databases and combine them with spatial data. That’s probably where I ran the biggest workspaces of my career... although they definitely weren’t the most optimized ones 😅

And then I naturally ended up at Consortech, a long-time Safe Software partner, where FME is at the center of what we do and how we help customers with their data integration challenges. So .. I’ve been around FME for quite a few years now, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon!

It was the primary ETL tool at my workplace, and used by the team quite extensively