Hello everyone,
Welcome to What's Up Wednesday, your weekly spot of FME news.
Training Season is Open!
When looking for FME news, I found a lot of training being organized for the near future. But I suppose just after a new FME release really is prime training season.
At Safe, we've just released updated content for FME 2022. That includes the trails FME Desktop Basic, and Integrate Data with the FME Platform; plus work is taking place on updating FME Server Authoring too.
Don't forget that our training takes place on the FME Academy and is all free to access:
Hmmm. Maybe I need to get myself a few more badges there!
I also noticed that a few partners have updated their training list too.
Firstly, Veremes in France has a new FME training calendar, including Introduction to FME Desktop, Introduction to FME Server, and Advanced FME Desktop.
Then I noticed Sweco (in Denmark) has updated their training calendar, again with Basic and Advanced FME Desktop, and FME Server Authoring.
Also, don't forget that con terra has an FME and Python course next week (in English) and that the upcoming FME User Conference (coming up way faster than I'd realized!) also has a set of in-person training available. I'll be hosting Dynamic Workflows with my colleague Dan. Expect the SchemaScanner to feature heavily there!
Build Your Own CityGuesser!
During the recent community webinar, we played an FME-powered CityGuesser game and several users asked how to host the game themselves.
Well, you're in luck! My colleague Mark W just posted the files so visit the webinar landing page and click the Download Workspaces button.
The package contains all of the workspaces, HTML, and data that you'll need to run your own CityGuesser. However, you will need to have your own API token for either Google or Esri; and will have to host the workspace on your own FME Server. But follow the readme instructions and it should be quite straightforward.
Oh, someone at Safe had the great idea of a CityGuesser challenge at the FME User Conference, so look for us to have that setup somewhere.
And speaking of the Community Webinar, did you see the couple of videos I posted this week? Here we have a post-webinar section of us talking about life in Bruce, Alberta; Dale's airport confusion; and our perfect phone alert sound.
Yes, Dale did make a phone alert of my chuckle! But that's OK. In return we have a short outtake of all the times his inner cowboy was revealed!
FME and Snowflake
It's nice that we're starting to get back to in-person conferences, and this week we attended the Snowflake Summit 2022.
A well-timed blog post also describes how Snowflake helps to provide accessible spatial data, and how FME can be used to populate your Snowflake system - and do much more too, of course.
We even have a full tutorial on the FME Community about how to use FME with Snowflake for reading and writing data.
Webinar Badges
If you follow the Webinar Badges Leaderboard - or my weekly tweet about it - then you might have noticed someone (I won't say who) redeemed a LOT of webinar badge codes all at once!
I admire the "chutzpah" but I don't know if we really want that. So I made a small alteration to the badge redemption feature:
Now you can't redeem more than 1 badge every hour. So well-played to that user, but it's not going to work for anyone else!
Scavenger Hunt
Speaking of stretching boundaries... it's very ingenious but using an app to emulate a GPS position isn't what I'd hoped for in the scavenger hunt.
So I'm going to reduce those challenges to just 5 points and if you want the full 100 then you'll need to send me photographic proof. Again, well played, but no!
Besides that, the event is going very well. We've 60+ participants and 4 private teams now (Team Nordic being the latest).
Remember, once a challenge is revealed, it usually stays up for the whole of the event. So you can sign up and take part at any time, and will still be able to catch up with the leaders.
There are still a number of private teams available too, so if you can get together a few work colleagues, friends, or even family members, then let me know and I'll give you the passcode to one of those teams.
Here's the current leaderboard:
Yes, there is a wide gap in points. But when some challenges are worth 75, 100, or even 125 points... well, you should be able to catch up quite quickly.
FME Tracks the Blockchain
Enric Shen must be the financial wizard of the FME world. Recently I mentioned his article on using FME to calculate income tax, and now he has one on using FME to track blockchain transactions!
What might be more surprising than someone doing this, is the fact that FME has a built-in transformer just for that purpose!
The EthereumConnector is part of a blockchain package on the FME Hub. It was created during our "Innovation Daze" event in 2019. Innovation Daze is when our developers get a week to work on personal projects of interest. There was talk about expanding it to include NFT tracking, but I don't know if that happened (I think it might have been done, but not uploaded to the Hub).
Anyway, check out the blog post if you are interested and notice that the last line promises a follow-up article on a specific project. I'll share that too when it comes.
General News
For more news, see the LinkedIn version of this newsletter (it's too large for this site to handle!)
