Happy New Year! Welcome to our January FME Community User Spotlight. Every month, we spotlight a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights!
User Spotlight: David Runneals / @runneals
What company do you currently work for?
Cultivate Geospatial
What’s your current job role and title?
Sr. GIS Architect
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
I use FME to get work done faster. From creating rapid prototypes that can be instantaneously deployed in production to automating data pipelines to helping write python that bulk assigns aliases to fields in SDE, there's not much that I haven't done with FME Form or FME Flow.
Why did you join the FME Community?
I joined it to share my knowledge and to grow from others.
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
Ask a question and get several different answers, and it’s typically much faster than using a support case - or - share things you’ve found, like what I did when I worked with the FME ArcGIS Online guru and esri support to resolve those pesky 50x errors.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you've built using FME.
I used FME to get data from ArcGIS Online into a formatted KML for display on television! So if you're in the midwest (ND, SD, NE, KS, MO, IL, WI, MN, or especially IOWA) during the winter and see winter road conditions or snowplows integrated into on-air weather software, that is powered by FME!
I’ve also put together a guide on FME Best Practices that I love sharing with the community!
Previously I’ve used it to move data from databases to ArcGIS Online for real-time datasets and grab parcel data from county assessors and dynamically map it to a standardized schema. See some of my past projects in previous blog posts and UC presentations from 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2022 (with a bonus presentation).
What's one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
The attribute manager can do so many amazing things! Renaming, creating, removing, conditional, date time, math expressions, formatting, extracting X & Y into attributes... There's really not much that it can't do.
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
iPhone (with satellite SOS), FME lizard, and zipster
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Antarctica with the penguins or literally anywhere in the world (I enjoy traveling).
Would you like to be featured on Spotlight of the Month? Fill out this form here.
We’ll see you next month!
