Behind The Scenes @ FormusPro As A Senior Hybrid Consultant

At FormusPro, our people are at the heart of everything we do.

In this instalment of our ‘Behind the Scenes’ series, we catch up with Cam, one of our Senior Hybrid Consultants. From Azure extensions and DevOps pipelines to Canvas Apps and Dynamics 365 solutions, he helps clients bring powerful Microsoft technologies to life, especially across the NonProfit sector.

Over to Cam…

I joined FormusPro back in October 2023, so just over two years ago now, and in that time I’ve loved how diverse my experience has been, both in the range of clients and sectors as well as exposure to the latest technology offerings from Microsoft.

Everything from Azure extensions, DevOps CI/CD pipelines and Terraform scripts all the way through to PCF controls, Cloud Flows and Canvas Apps.

My title is Senior Hybrid Consultant, which means I sit at the crossroads between technology and people… understanding a client’s business needs, then turning them into practical, technical solutions that make sense in the real world. I bridge the gap between discovery, design and delivery… helping clients shape what they need, then leading the technical design that turns those ideas into secure, scalable and genuinely useful solutions.

That means I stay involved right through delivery, making sure what we build really works for the people who’ll use it every day.

When I first moved to England from South Africa in 2017, I started out as a door-to-door salesman, a trial by fire for an introvert if ever there was one!

After that, I spent a couple of years in the service industry, eventually becoming assistant manager of a busy pub in Bristol city centre. I’ve always had a natural understanding of computers, so I decided to make the jump into IT Support, first on an application support desk for a dental healthcare company, then for a software provider serving police and local councils.

Even though I didn’t finish my Computer Science degree, that passion for development kept tugging at me (I campaigned endlessly to be allowed to code) and eventually, in 2021, I landed a junior developer role with a Microsoft partner. That’s where my journey with D365 began.

These days, my favourite thing about working at FormusPro is the impact we get to make through our clients. A lot of my projects are with NonProfit organisations doing genuinely life-changing work, and it’s so rewarding to deliver solutions that free up their time so they can focus on real-world change.

Every so often I get to directly collaborate on that impact first-hand, and that feeling is hard to beat. I also love the teaching side of what I do… helping colleagues and clients understand the ‘why’ behind the code. There’s nothing better than watching that penny-drop moment in someone’s eyes.

Probably the coolest thing I’ve ever built using the Microsoft Tech Stack was a Spotify extension I integrated into Dynamics 365 CE.

Early in my career, a mentor told me the fastest way to learn and progress was to build around something you’re genuinely passionate about. So I did exactly that… an automated “Release Radar Builder” that queries Spotify daily for new tracks from my favourite artists and adds them to fresh playlists. It’s been running for four years now, and I still use it every day. It’s a little bit nerdy and a lot of fun, and it reminds me why I fell in love with development in the first place.

Outside of work, I tend to live in two phases.

In the “summer” months (May to August) I take most of my annual leave, off on long weekend hikes and camping trips with my partner, slacklining, learning to fly first-person-view drones and squeezing in at least one big international backpacking trip a year (Vietnam and Sri Lanka so far).

Come “winter” (September to April), I hibernate and tinker… 3D printing, coding microcontrollers, building drones and learning new skills. Last winter I taught myself Python by training a neural network to play the mobile game 2048. Like most developers, I also fit in a healthy amount of gaming too.

As a final part to this article, Marketing asked me, if I could host a dinner party with any three famous people… alive or dead, who would it be and why?

Honestly though?

As I said, I’m an introvert, so the idea of a table full of strangers sounds like a nightmare! If I had to choose, I’d invite Barack Obama, not because I’m particularly into American politics, but because he just seems like a genuinely chill guy to hang out with.

*Cam is a Senior Hybrid Consultant at FormusPro, a Microsoft Solutions Partner specialising in The Microsoft Tech Stack and AI.

Connect with him on LinkedIn.