Hi! I'm James Solan

I build solutions primarily on Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, and Copilot. At the weekends you’ll find me up a mountain or somewhere impractical in the van with my girlfriend and dog. In the evenings you can find me noodling about with Home Assistant and an ever growing collection of Raspberry Pis and ESP32 controllers, programming them to do Very Important Things like building Snake on a Christmas Tree.

What do you do?

I get my kicks out of figuring out problems and making things better for people. I stay curious, challenge assumptions, and pick the right tool for the job, not forcing a familiar solution to fit. My goal is to fix things well, with a nod to what could happen next. Most recently I’ve specialised in LLMs, and the Agentification of the workplace. As with process, apps, and dashboard design, the same rules apply. Good foundations in data, structure and security matter.

What have you done?

After a stint working at various sizes of IT consultancies I setup on my own. I’ve worked for a global drinks company, creating apps and the data foundations to manage their stock warehouse, a global property management company, developing ML algorithms to predict footfall and consumer spend for retail clients. I’ve worked in oil and gas as a digital rock analyst, determining porosity and permeability with computational fluid dynamics derived from CT scans and physical sample analysis. I’ve also worked as a field geologist in remote Rajasthan, studying the largest known reservoir in India. At university I studied the metal content and mineralogy of deep sea hydrothermal vents using micro-CT scanning. Along the way, I also had a stint as a cattle station hand in Western Australia.

Why AI?

It’s the tool I’ve been wanting my entire professional career (apart from the stint as a station hand). It’s already changing how we work, and it will only continue to accelerate that shift. As a developer, it’s accelerated understanding, coding and learning. As a platform architect it’s allowed me to create and edit diagrams much faster than previously, with custom interfaces to script tools like PlantUML. Hell, when on a long drive abroad, I’ve even used it to find interesting dog walks.

Ultimately, the knack with AI is responsibility. Use it to augment, not replace. Use it to learn, not churn out slop. Really engage with it, and be critical of the output it creates. Be thoughtful with it’s implementation, set the foundations correctly, test the outcome intensively and you’ll get a solid result.

Short Bio

A creative IT consultant with near a decade specifically in the power platform space. Experienced in creating apps for a range of industries, from warehouse management and property management to oil and gas data collection, analysis and presentation. I challenge the status quo and am driven to give people the tooling to work faster and to a higher standard.