Welcome to our June 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: Matt Smillie ​@virtualcitymatt 

What company do you currently work for? 

Virtual City Systems

What’s your current job role and title? 

Project Manager of FME Workflows (aka FME Guy)

Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME? 

I currently work in the 3D city model/digital twin space. The company I work for (Virtual City Systems) has built an out-of-the-box solution on top of CesiumJS for visualizing a 3D city scene.

Along with the front end visualization, we also have a back end component, which handles conversion from typical formats (e.g., CityGML) into Cesium supported formats (3D Tiles,  QMesh Terrain, etc). In addition to conversions, the back end also acts as an interactive configuration platform, from which the 3D apps and data can be published. 

Personally, I use FME every day to do things which FME is the wrong tool for...but I like using it so much I can't help using it before I try anything else. 

As well as just internal daily work, I also manage a few FME based products/projects, for example a 3D Clip and Snip export tool and a Generic 3D Model upload tool. Here I have integrated git and I use Gitlab Pipelines to help automate the building and publishing of the FME Form projects.

We have a mixture of hosted and on-prem customers, so our FME solutions need to be designed with distribution in mind.

FME also plays a role for us in consulting services where the tasks vary significantly.

Why did you join the FME Community?

I originally joined the FME Community while I was working at Safe Software (I used to be a member of the support team back in 2016-2018). Part of my job there was to write tutorials and answer users questions.

What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?

There are heaps of helpful users in the community who are always willing to help. For best or fastest help, including the log (or relevant sections of the log) always helps along with things like FME version, etc. 

Share as much as you can in your post, e.g., workspace, data screen shots. Often background into why you're trying to do what you're trying to do can also be helpful.

It's also good to show what you've already tried and what articles you've already looked at.   

If you want to add something later to your original question, it's often better to update the original post rather than to leave a comment/reply/answer. I tend to filter for questions which don't have any answers yet.

I often spend time on the community looking at questions which are outside of my area of expertise. I can recommend this to anyone looking to widen their skill-set.

Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you’ve built using FME.

My favorite one is the RickRoller custom transformer. We all like a good meme, what's a better way to lighten up someone's day then by rick rolling them. 

The RickRoller can also act as a great lesson on security. Don't run anything from the community when you don't know what it does! If it's got a password on it then you have no idea at all what it's doing!

What’s one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?

When you really want to control the flow of features or where validation is critical these three tools are essential for me:

1. NoFeatureTester - Helps to catch unexpected issues
2. FeatureFlowValve - Helps to direct flow of features
3. Terminator - For halting the process before anything bad happens

Another tip, don't use debug logging except when working with web based processes. The debug logging can be helpful here. I've not found a helpful use otherwise. 

If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?

My FME Socks, my FME backpack, and my FME Rain Jacket.

If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Home, and I do everyday.