Take a break with... Ian Fletcher

Tell us about yourself? 

I am an FME Certified Professional and have been since October 2019 and I have been working for 1Spatial since March, 2020.

Before joining 1Spatial, I worked in the oil and gas industry for 8.5 years, using FME and Esri products to process and automate complex subsurface geological models using public and proprietary data.

Fun fact about you?

Since the beginning of the lockdown, I have been teaching myself how to bake... I can now make a mean sourdough loaf!

What’s your favourite transformer and why?

Probably the WorkspaceRunner. This is a great example of a deceptively simple transformer that is incredibly powerful and easily adapted to a huge range of batch processing scenarios. Repetitive tasks that used to take days can be reduced down to just a few clicks. I used to work a lot with global-scale datasets, and so the Reprojector-CoordinateSystemSetter combination has got me out of a number of sticky situations also.

What’s the most interesting data challenge you’ve tackled?

In my previous role at Halliburton, I helped to design an automated workflow for generating paleo-climate predictions from plate tectonic models. That was certainly a very unique challenge, but the results were visually very engaging when processed using the NumericRasterizer transformer in FME.

How long have you been working with FME?

I was dabbling with various workspaces that colleagues had already made for a number of years before adopting FME myself. Having used Esri Model Builder in the past, it was pretty easy to pick up and I was soon redesigning some of the long-established manual workflows we had in my team.

What do you love about FME?

It always blows my mind when I see FME complete a task in a couple of minutes that may otherwise have taken someone hours or even days to complete by hand.

If you were given an airline ticket to go anywhere in the world where would you go and why?

Tricky. I’ve always been a bit of a geology nerd, so I’d love to see the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park at some point.

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