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 I 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 I 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. If I want to learn something, it’s a tool to be curious and dive into tangents with. As a developer, I use it to rubber duck, I use it professionally, and closely monitor and guide it to the solution I want, without having to code everything. I enjoy fixing problems, code is just a means to an end. I use it personally to vibe code daft apps and more recently manage my knowledge bank and blog, translating scribbles and random notes from conferences into something meaningful. Hell, when on a long drive abroad, I’ve even used it to find interesting dog walks between stopovers.

Responsibility is key with AI. You’re still in control and own the output. Use it to augment, not replace. Use it to learn, not create slop. Engage with it, and be critical of the output. Be thoughtful with it’s implementation, set the foundations correctly, test the outcome intensively and 9/10 you’ll get a solid result.

Short Bio

A creative IT consultant with near a decade specifically in the power platform space. Experienced in architecting and creating apps and data visualisations 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 enable people to do their jobs more easily, with more insight.