Hello FME'ers and welcome to What's Up Wednesday...

Safe World Tour News

Let's start with news about Safe's event on the FME World Tour. We call it a virtual brunch-and-learn, and it takes place on April 5th and 6th.

Day 1 is a set of higher-level talks about the value of FME and how it helps to fuel business decisions. Day 2 is a more technical series of talks with specific demonstrations and examples.

Meanwhile, before the event starts, you can also take part in our Data-Driven Photo Contest:

Not only do you get to dress as a racing driver, there are also epic prizes including a pass for the FME User Conference and a PS/5!

Partner World Tour News

Obviously, there are many partner events going on too, some in-person and some online, but all with the same racecar theme.

One in-person event is hosted by Norkart, in Oslo on 21st April. An online event coming up even sooner is hosted by Locus (New Zealand/Australia), 29th-31st March.

Why have I picked out those two events in particular? Well, I noticed that both are offering rides in sports cars as prizes at the events!

Another "attraction" of attending the virtual New Zealand event is that I'm appearing as a panellist in their "Roundtable Discussion with our FME Experts" and that you won't want to miss!

If you have a World Tour event you'd like highlighted, just let me know.

Safe and User Blog Posts

On the Safe Software Blog this week I noticed a post entitled "A Guide to Modernizing Legacy Systems with FME".

It's a good high-level read with a bit of a twist. We often assume that legacy systems are only mentioned when we want to migrate them to a newer setup.

But, this article makes the point, perhaps FME can help integrate a legacy system with newer technology. Not replacing it, but better connecting it. Modernizing it. It's not something I'd considered, so it is an interesting point.

On the more technical side, Bruce Harold at Esri came up with a way of importing Google location data (data recorded by your phone) into a Geodatabase using Esri's FME-based Data Interoperability tools.

The data starts out messy, but is dramatically cleaner when run through the ArcGIS Online Routing Service:

Data Cleanup is the key part. Bruce told me that there may be spikes in the data, but higher-end devices might not have the same problem.

I think that's a great example of integrating FME and Esri technology. I hope to find time to make an FME-specific version. Or you can try it directly in Esri yourself. Bruce's article has the two workspaces and custom format attached.

Community Badge Leaderboard

I know that community badges (or gamification in general) aren't everyone's favourite thing, but if we have badges we ought to make the most of them. I couldn't find a way to create a badging report directly, so FME to the rescue!

The only way I could integrate it into the community was as an image, so that's what I used FME to create. The basics are:

• HTTPCallers to retrieve badge info through an API
• JSONFragmenters to handle the API responses
• VertexCreators to turn each record into a position on the report
• AttributeManagers to create the label to create
• A MapnikRasterizer to generate the final image from all of the inputs

The workspace looks like this:

What I like to do in designing a workspace is create sections joined together by hidden connections (tunnels). If you want to see what I mean, I made a little app to show that hidden layer of connections. It's like a Before/After image where you move the marker to reveal hidden details.

I also set up a small workspace to tweet the image once a week.

Anyway, please do check out the Community Badge Leaderboard page and, if interested, I made a short video to announce it and also the 2022 FME Trading Cards.

User and Partner Activities

I found this post on LinkedIn by Quentin Marquette with an FME workspace that reads data from the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) in GeoPackage format:

He says "it is clearly not the most elegant and optimized FME script (it is even clearly boring) but we will stay on functional... Keep in touch for the rest and use cases."

I quite like this, Quentin, and I think it is a lesson to us to keep our work simple and functional. Also, I recommend readers to check out the interesting comments on the post.

Meanwhile in New Zealand again, Locus has a few more Supercar Challenge videos, where users are interviewed about FME while riding in a fast car. This one, in particular, has a brief amount of FME talk, but a lot more screaming!

FME's Favourite Transformer

We're now at the Quarter Final stage and with only 8 transformers remaining, the matchups are becoming quite tense.

Don't forget to check out the current scores and cast your votes too!

Miscellaneous and Congratulations...

Congratulations this week to Simon Bardsley for obtaining Certified FME Professional status and to Jeroen Roelofs for Certified Server Professional. Also congratulations also to Ciaran Kirk for 20 years at Safe-partner IMGS.

FME-related jobs to be found in the UK, i Sverige, and - of course - at Safe!

A reminder that North American FME projects can be nominated for the Consortech Awards of FME Excellence, but the deadline is fast approaching.