From Paraguay to Tarragona: Cristhian Fernandez's Tech Journey through Software Development, Microsoft Business Applications, and the Power Platform

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is located in Spain. He is the founder and solution architect at Creativity Spark. He's first awarded his MVP in 2023. He works in different roles, primarily focused on designing and delivering systems based on the Microsoft business application platforms. You can find links to his bio and social media, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Chris. Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks for having me. Good to have you on the show. Tell us a bit about food, family and fun Now, because I know you don't originate from where you live. Also, tell us a bit about where you come from.

Cristhian Fernandez: 1:46
I'm currently based in Tarragona. It's a city one hour to the south of Barcelona in Spain. I'm originally from Paraguay, south America. I lived in different places in the world. Now I am based here. Family, food and fun right Family. I have a rather big family. I have four kids. They are from all ages. The youngest is 11 years old, then I have a boy, 12, then 15 and 18 years old. They keep me busy, those teenage years. They drive me crazy as well, but they're fantastic. I live here in Tarragona with my partner as well, loving it so far. Do you have kids?

Mark Smith: 2:51
I do. I do have an 18-year-old. I have an 18-year-old, and I have a one-year-old and a almost three-year-old.

Cristhian Fernandez: 3:01
Fantastic. You know the experience.

Mark Smith: 3:07
Yes, how did you end up in a city south of Barcelona? How did you end up there?

Cristhian Fernandez: 3:15
It's easy. I started this adventure of founding my own company, creativity Spark, after the pandemic. We relocated to Barcelona. Barcelona is a great city. It's a fantastic, vibrant, multiple nationalities living there, very touristic as well. It's just too much. So there is this city, which is not as big as Barcelona. It's very handy. It's just one hour train from Barcelona, so the company is based in the city, in the big city. Given that I'm working most of the time remotely, it makes sense for us. It's a smaller place With everything you may need. It's close to the beach as well, so everything you need in a smaller place regarding rents, and all of that is cheaper as well. So it's kind of handy and convenient for us. So that's why we started living in Barcelona at the beginning, and then we relocated to Tarragona. You probably know Jordi Montana, the creator of FIEXR and Misi. He lives nearby as well. So we are kind of starting playing around with the idea of creating the Tarragona platform community, so that's gonna happen soon. So, yeah, that's more or less the story.

Mark Smith: 4:56
What led you to leave Paraguay?

Cristhian Fernandez: 4:59
That was a long time ago, right when I finished high school, my aunt was living in Spain at the moment and I don't know, I always kind of was this, this type of itchy feet person, right, trying to move everywhere, right, trying to, or liking to know places, and also my first thought was to go somewhere else to finish my studies, and that's what I did. Initially, my plans were to. My plan was to study kind of construction architecture right, that was the idea. Right, I wanted to be a kind of a building architecture and I ended up being a solutions architect. It's not quite the same, but I still manage or get to build things, right, that's what I enjoy. So, yeah, that was more or less the story right, so I left Paraguay, finished high school, left Paraguay, lived in Madrid for a few years, then moved to Ireland. Right, I lived in Dublin for many years as well. That was probably one of the best experiences of my life. You know, I learned so much there, I made so good friends, and then the pandemic hit, you know. And you know, we relocated to Spain. Back to Spain again, where part of my family is living. I have family members living in Paraguay, but most of them are my mother and siblings are living in Madrid, so we are closer to them as well. So, yeah, so that's more or less.

Mark Smith: 6:59
That's such a good story. How did you get involved with dynamics? What was the very first project? How did it become something you became aware of? And then what's your journey being from? You know Microsoft business applications. You know what are the Microsoft technologies. What other IT technologies do you cover? What's the journey been for you?

Cristhian Fernandez: 7:25
Well, I started, I finished my career right, my studies, sorry, studying computer science. And after that, you know, I started as a developer. First, my first job was a C++ developer, so I kind of started this world by typing code and that was more or less what I did for the good first part of my career. And around 2011, right, I, back in the back in the I was already part of, you know, the Microsoft community and in Madrid, right, and I attended to several gatherings and sessions, you know, about all sorts of technologies around the Microsoft ecosystem. Right, and back in 2011, when CRM 2011 was about to be launched, right, Marco Amoedo, another MVP, right kind of presented to the dotnet community in Madrid about this new tool called CRM 2011. And that's when I I saw it and I thought, wow, this is impressive. Right, what I would just did in 10 minutes, what it would take me to do one day of work in the best case scenario, you know, and I was, this has potential. Right, and this was kind of the first contact for me. And after that I, you know, wanted to learn a little bit more about it. So I kept kind of learning and in my company, I told them, you know, back in the day, I was working for Microsoft partner and I told them I want to kind of refocus my career and try to learn more about these. If there are any CRM projects that you can put me on, I will appreciate. And that's how it started basically, so that was 2011.

Mark Smith: 9:33
Yeah, that's so cool to hear somebody like Marco, you know, being that kind of tipping point and, of course, yeah, he's a legend in the community and in Spain and I so love that. I think that that is and what I think, what I like the most about it. It wasn't that you found it via Microsoft, right, you found it by the community. And one of the things that I love about our community it is amazing vibrant community where people, no matter how skilled or unskilled they are or where they are on their journey, they're invited in, they're treated well, they can engage and they can find their place. What did you just start your own company?

Cristhian Fernandez: 10:20
Well, it was a little bit of, you know, my previous experience in Ireland, right, I, you know, I kind of developed my career and, aside from all the technical stuff, you know I was a solution architect back then. You know, I started kind of learning more about the process of managing a consultancy company, a partner, right, and I thought that that was really interesting. You know being able to not only deliver a project anymore, right, you know, when you're a consultant and you work for a customer, you are assigned, you know, a piece of work and you deliver that, and that's a great challenge in itself. But, as was getting closer and closer to kind of the management side of things, I thought this is really really cool as well. You know being able to put in place processes, you know, not only for you but for other architects, and create something, you know, that spans beyond yourself. That, to me, was really appealing, you know, and I thought I think I can do this right. I didn't know how difficult it was. It is really really harder than it seems. And you know being able to create a company, right, you create the culture of it from the ground up. That's really interesting, right, and after the pandemic you know everybody. I think many people right were kind of trying to redefine their careers as well, trying to think what they wanted to do, and to me that was the tipping point. I relocated to Spain and I told myself yeah, this is a good moment to try it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but I need to try it at least once and see how it goes.

Mark Smith: 13:15
So how many years have you been operating?

Cristhian Fernandez: 13:18
Since 2021, so this is gonna be. We're gonna start a third year now.

Mark Smith: 13:22
And what type of work do you do? What do you typically focus? More on Power Platform or more on a specific dynamics product? Where's your area of focus?

Cristhian Fernandez: 13:33
Well, so far in my career I was more focused on dynamics right as the Power Platform started to grow. More and more customers are trying to use this technology now and to leverage to use it with other systems dynamics or even finance or whatever other systems they may have and the ecosystem has grown so much as well, like it's getting so big nowadays you have so many pieces that you can choose from and use them. So I initially started focusing more on dynamics than learning a lot about the Power Platform lately and in creativity spark, what we are doing is trying to focus more on the Power Platform side of things. The type of businesses that are our potential customers are more or less small companies where they already know they want to use the Power Platform and they need help technical help, right. If they understand that Power Platform is a potential feed or is a potential solution for a problem they may have, so they're sure about this, then they can help. They can get technical help from us and we are focusing on technical access of it. You know your self consultancy is so big you have the business aspect. When you need to go and understand the business problem, power Platform or dynamics may or may not be the right solution for them. That's another story, and that understanding that part is another process. But say someone, a company they really went through that process and needs technical help developers and solution architects like myself. So here we are trying to help them solve their problems and build the apps they may need. Right, that's the idea, and it's interesting because the way Microsoft advertises the Power Platform is that everybody can be a citizen developer and anyone can build applications, and that's totally true. But the reality as well that's only part of the reality is that as a Power Platform becomes more and more powerful, right, you are able to do more stuff with it. But in order to do more complicated or more complex stuff, you really need to have a good understanding technical understanding of the solutions and how to put the pieces together, and that's not always easy and that's not always something that a citizen developer can do. And that's where we can help them.

Mark Smith: 16:29
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a powerful story. Right Is the idea that citizen developers can build solutions. I think has been indexed on very heavily. But you know, across my career I built some big solutions on that very enterprise grade and that's, of course, using model-driven experiences, which is back to really decorative development in Dynamics 365. I mean, sorry, they're the first party, but of course we now. One of the things we always wanted, what we yearned for, was the ability to buy a, if you like, a headless platform. You know, get rid of the Dynamics piece please, I'll build a solution on it and the Power Platform was that answer. So it's amazing and to see you know that true enterprise grade applications can be built far beyond just, you know, if you like, simple use cases that you often see in the Canvas app type landscape.

Cristhian Fernandez: 17:32
Yeah, and nowadays everybody is kind of aware of you know the type of customizations that you can make and the types that you can't. But back in 2011, back when I started, right, it was all about trying to hack the platform in a way so you can get the most out of it. You know getting these weird JavaScripts or weird plugins, trying to understand you know the API underneath and trying to build kind of robust and and as you said, enterprise grade applications with what CRM provided, right, and because back in the day it was very limited what you could and what you couldn't do and you kind of needed to hack everything. But nowadays it's getting easier and easier because everything is there for you to use and everything is very well documented as well. Yeah, it's getting easier in a way, but you have more pieces in the puzzle, so you have to know you need to know what you're doing.

Mark Smith: 18:35
Yes, so true. I was talking to someone earlier today about one of the solutions we built, managed their routing infrastructure in WAOS, australia, and the geography of that routing structure was 11 times the size of the United Kingdom. Wow. And back then you talked about hacking. Absolutely right that's. We built that all on the same dynamics 365 sales. It was not nothing to do with sales, but it allowed us to build a mobile app on top of that, using do you remember the old Outlook connector, the old, the old right. So that was our mobility you know surface that gave us SQL light underneath, that allowed us to have offline and you know we built it to run on ruggedized devices mounted inside, you know, roadwork trucks and with full ArcGIS integration and they could go along and they could just put a dot on the map, drag a circle and say, okay, that's a pothole, and it would automatically calculate the size or the remediation based on the road surface, et cetera, create a work order and then we could use it to run on the road surface, create a work order and when they came back and synced at the end of the day their devices, that would hand that all into the system or did signed it out to contractors. This is all before field service was available. But you know we used to build those type of scaled solutions back in the day and of course now you know I mean in that use case you'd just go with field service, right? No brainer, exactly, but. But the beauty is you could really take the power platform and there'd be nothing stopping you building that solution directly on the power platform today.

Cristhian Fernandez: 20:23
And even before that, even before the Outlook connector in 2011,. If we still go back. I don't know if you remember CRM4, right, you had access because all of that was on-prem. Back in the day, you had access to the ASPX files, the entire source code of the solution. So some people were even modifying those ASPX files to inject their own logic or maybe. Sql injections they just everything Naughty naughty naughty breaks. You know it was.

Mark Smith: 20:53
I remember you know you'd go. This is you're definitely not allowed to do it as in from Absolutely not. Yeah, you will remove the ability to ford grade your solution if you did that. But yeah, that was amazing time. What's what's what excites you as we got a report? What excites you about the horizon, what you see going forward? The opportunities in the market.

Cristhian Fernandez: 21:17
Well, many things right. There are so many things to. It's kind of even difficult to focus nowadays because there are so many new trends coming out. But I think the entire kind of software industry is this changing a little bit towards this philosophy of the power platform, right, and the low code philosophy right. I don't think I mean there's always, there's always going to be space for everybody. But I think more and more we're going to see more and more products like the power platform where, with a little bit of kind of a drag and drop UI, you can build very powerful applications right from all different types right. The kind of low-code technology plus AI. I think that's going to be a that combinations when we're going to be see more and more in the future. With all of this language, large language models that we are coming out now, plus the ability to, with a few instructions or a few lines of instructions, you can end up building an app. The combination of both of them is going to be kind of the way we will be developing applications in the future. It sounds incredibly difficult, but at the same time, it's something that three, four, five years ago we didn't know it was possible. In a way, now you're starting to take shape. Yeah, that part only the fact that we are able to write down instructions and get an application out of it that sounds like science fiction, but not anymore. Not anymore. It seems possible. Now, if that's the way we are going to build applications in the future years, that means that we are going to be way more productive. At the same time, that's going to be kind of the bare minimum where anyone with the right prompt can create an app very easily and very quickly. That's the starting point. Imagine what things we can do with that, how many different things we can combine those applications and what can we create. It's kind of really interesting to try to see where we are moving towards. Yeah, that's the part that excites me the more that opens up possibilities as well In companies. There's so much that we can do in terms of training. That will be the first thing, because, even though these technologies are going to be easier and easier to use, there's going to be new challenges in terms of covenants as well, because the problems that we already have nowadays if everybody is able to create applications easily, how you manage those applications, how you make sure that the data stays where it should be, all of the data protections and the security are in place. There will be so many challenges in that regard as well, how you create those apps in a way that are maintainable, that are secure, that can be extended easily, that are under control. Essentially, the way we build applications is already changing radically, but the old challenges will still be there. They're going to just be different, probably more complicated, and it's going to require from us to try to get our job done better, in better ways. You probably know this, but in training as well, think about the impact of AI in training in the future years. So if you can now open chat GPT and start asking about how do I create a plugin in Dynamics and it shows you step by step how to do it, how long it's going to be until you ask the AI to give you a video on how you do it, and it shows you step by step. So where does that leave a camera for trainers? Is it going to replace trainers or is it going to give trainers more opportunities to create more efficient ways to train people? I don't know. It's really interesting to me. It's a fantastic kind of feature that we are seeing now we are experiencing already, so very exciting.

Mark Smith: 26:45
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.