Welcome to our October FME Community User Spotlight! Every month, we’ll be spotlighting a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable to the community. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights!
User Spotlight: Alexandre Bizien @alexbiz
What company do you currently work for?
Veremes
What’s your current job role and title?
Solutions Engineer and FME Expert
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
I’ve been working for almost ten years at a French FME reseller, where I’m involved in both technical and pre-sales activities, especially around FME Flow.
My main role is providing support and technical expertise in French for the software. I also deliver training sessions on FME Form and FME Flow - more than a hundred sessions so far, with over 300 participants trained.
Beyond training and support, I provide consulting, coaching, technical audits, and assistance around FME, and I serve as the FME Flow reference at Veremes.
Coming from a computer science rather than a geomatics background, I often work with APIs, both consuming and creating them through FME Flow. I also develop custom transformers, workspaces, and Flow projects. Overall, building FME-based processes both for internal needs and for our clients.
Why did you join the FME Community?
I initially joined the FME Community mainly to find answers. Most of the time, when I had issues with FME, either my own or those my clients encountered, my Google searches would lead me straight to the FME Community site. The forum helped me find technical solutions and best practices for using FME.
After a while, I wanted to give back by sharing resources I’d created myself - like my suite of transformers for data virtualization (DataVirtualizationResponseSetter, DataVirtualizationJSON*, etc.) and the BetterReportGenerator. I wanted to share these tools with the broader international FME user base.
Now I stick around to answer questions whenever I can, and to pick up interesting best practices from other users as well.
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
I think the key is to ask questions and not be afraid to do so. Share your workbench, and most importantly, share your resources as much as you can.
When you’re asking questions about your workflow, it's really helpful to provide your workspace along with any data it uses. Ideally, you can share it as an FMWT (template) file, which includes cached data. That way, others can open it and reproduce the problem exactly as you see it on your own machine.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you’ve built using FME.
One of my use cases, which might not be the most exciting but is definitely unique, was analyzing my Minecraft server logs. I used FME to extract IP addresses from those logs and geolocate them. The idea was to visualize who was trying to connect, and since I had FME at hand, I thought, why not use it for that? In the process, I also developed a transformer called 'IPAddressLookup' that lets you input an IP address and use a geolocation API to find the request’s location.
What’s one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
One of my favorite tips - kind of a pro tip for speeding up development - is not to type the full transformer names in the Quick Add search. Instead, just type the end of one word and the beginning of the next. For example, for 'AttributeCreator,' you can simply type 'teCrea,' and the autocompletion will do the rest. This way, you avoid typing 'Attribute' in full and getting a long list of all the attribute-related transformers, when all you really want is to quickly find AttributeCreator.
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
A hammock, a CoconutKeeper, and my ukulele. Maybe I could finally learn more than the two songs I’ve been stuck playing all this time!
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
It would really depend on when you ask me. But right now, with this heatwave, I’d love to head up into the Alps to enjoy the fresh air and take in the scenery!
