James Callaghan

I’ve spent around twenty years working across the Microsoft ecosystem, from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and early enterprise collaboration platforms through to Microsoft 365, Azure, Copilot and today’s AI application development patterns.

My career has taken me from systems support and SharePoint engineering into consultancy, architecture, smart places, IoT and AI solution acceleration. I joined Microsoft in 2015 and now work in the Global Engineering & Architecture team, focused on designing and developing AI solutions that combine Azure, containers, modern web apps, automation, DevOps, GitHub, infrastructure as code and applied AI.

Much of my earlier work was with UK public sector, defence and central government customers, helping them modernise collaboration, productivity and business applications. These days I work with teams and customers across the world, helping shape solution architecture that is practical, sustainable and useful beyond the first demo.

Cooking is how I switch off, and also the reason I keep threatening to finish my recipe app. I’m an enthusiastic amateur cook rather than a chef, but I love the mix of process, creativity and feeding people.

Away from the kitchen, I’m into mountain biking, Formula 1, Lego, photography and far too many smart-home projects. Home Assistant is the rabbit hole that keeps on giving: dashboards, automations, sensors, wall panels, lighting scenes and small tools that start as “wouldn’t it be useful if…” and somehow become weekend projects.

Photography is still part of the mix too. I’m a Fuji X-series fan, even if I’m more selective these days about when I carry a camera.

First and foremost, I’m a dad to two girls. A lot of my projects now start with family life in mind: making the house work better, making routines easier, capturing memories, or building small things that make day-to-day life a little smoother.

I still believe sharing is caring. The Microsoft community has always been full of people who quietly make each other better, and I try to carry that into my work and my teams.

That might mean writing up what I’ve learned, sharing code on GitHub, posting on LinkedIn, answering questions on Reddit, or encouraging someone in the team to host a short session on something they’ve figured out. Not everything needs to be a conference talk; sometimes the most useful thing is a ten-minute explanation that saves someone else a day.

Some of the most useful things I’ve learned came from someone else taking the time to write down what worked, what didn’t, and what they wished they’d known earlier. I try to do the same here.

This blog is part notebook, part project log, part personal archive and part reminder to future-me. I write about the finished version when there is one, but I’m often more interested in the messy middle: the decisions, false starts, rabbit holes and small breakthroughs that don’t always make it into polished documentation.