Hello and welcome to What's Up Wednesday
We didn't get a post last week (sorry) so you can imagine that this one has a lot of items to mention!
A Community Guide to FME Best Practices
Last week I tweeted a screenshot of a workspace I was working on and talked about how it was time to do some best practice on it:
Of course, Best Practice is more than just the style of a workspace; it's also about how you go about creating a workspace and testing/debugging what you have.
Anyway, I suggested perhaps we should create an e-book or similar entitled "A Community Guide to FME Best Practices" and it seemed to be a popular idea with everyone. So I'm now determined to make this a reality and will reach out soon to those folks on Twitter and anyone else who would like to contribute.
I'm really excited to get this going and think it will be a great community project.
FME 2022 News
We've all been waiting anxiously for news of when FME 2022 will be released, and now we have a date:
On my calendar, the first week of May is next week! So by the time the next What's Up Wednesday comes out, FME 2022 might be officially available for download!
Of course, there are lots of great things, but one deprecated item I don't think has been mentioned is ArcPad Exchange format. It's only available in 32-bit and so 2021 is the last FME version in which it will be available. So I thought I'd mention it.
The full list of items deprecated in FME is always available on our FME Community knowledge base.
Webinars
If you want to get up to speed quickly on FME 2022, several webinars covered the new functionality. For example, this one on the Clipper, and this one on the engine. Less formal discussions also occurred in my sneak peeks.
If there are other topics you are interested in, then do let me know. But that leads to another thing that I wanted to mention. We're going to start adding webinar topics to the Ideas list on the FME Community. That way you can help us pick subjects by upvoting and can even make suggestions of your own. So look for that to happen shortly.
World Tour News
Of course, the FME release occurs simultaneously with the FME World Tour and - despite the official Safe event being complete - there are lots more events going on around the world.
In the Netherlands, Red Geographics are getting into the swing of the theme (although with a false start):
Their virtual event (in Dutch) is on May 11th.
1Spatial has a series of events over Australia and Singapore:
There are also many events from con terra, Sweco, Consortech, GeneGIS, and many other of our main partners. Remember, the events are all listed on the FME World Tour website. So go check it out now!
I'm not sure what swag is available for in-person events, but I see one user received their swag prizes for the Safe event and is very happy:
Community News
Let's take a look at some general news about the FME Community.
Badges
In response to this idea, I created an article page that lists all of the available badges, like this section:
So now you can create your own checklist and tick off the badges as you receive them. And don't forget that there is a new badge leaderboard that gets updated daily.
New Webinar
The last time we did a community-based webinar, it was so well received that the marketing team would like us to do another! So look forward to FME Community Games - Take 2, coming in early June. It's not on the webinar list yet, but I'll let you know when it is.
And in case you missed it, here's a recording of the previous one.
Scavenger Hunt
I thought about a fun event that we could hold over the summer and came up with the idea of a "scavenger hunt". It's a game where we solve puzzles, take photos, and answer quiz questions over June, July, and August.
It will be based on teams, so this is a heads-up to start planning who you might want to partner with. More details will come shortly and we'll launch the event during the above webinar.
Cloud-Optimized Formats
Cloud-Optimized Geotiff is getting a lot of attention in general right now, and fortunately, FME does have support in 2022. We covered it in our recent "Under the Hood" webinar:
Meanwhile, what other formats could be cloud-optimized? Could it be this...
It actually sounds like a semi-serious idea. And since Shapefile is a very popular format, it is worth contemplating.
Other News
In case it's of interest, there's a new customer story on our website that demonstrates FME's ability to give a great return on your investment. Using FME Server apps, their investment in FME was repaid five-times over in just a single year!
Congratulations to Markus, Christian H, and Christian D at con terra in Germany for publishing their "Handbook to Data Integration in FME"
In the US, Kevin Weller has produced a new version of his GeometryValidationHTMLReporter transformer for FME 2022, and published it to the FME Hub.
Meanwhile, the humourous tweet of the week...
Certifications
A quick call out to those receiving or renewing certification recently, including: Mark McCart, Stewie He, Fabien Lezeau, Brendan Cunningham, Mathew Cooper, Sarah Singh, and Vasudeo Patil.