Community Power and Tech Evolution - Parvez Ghumra's Story

Mark Smith: 0:19
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 from Leicester in the United Kingdom. He works at XRM Solutions as a Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 CE, as well as Azure Developer and Technical Consultant. His first award is MVP in 2024. I know him personally. He is amazing. He is a massive supporter of the community. Whether it's blogging, user groups, he's involved. Most recently, I saw him at the Power Platform Summit in Vegas. He has a background in bespoke software development using Microsoft technology stack. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Parvez.

Parvez Ghumra : 1:31
Thanks so much, Mark. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here and great to be talking to you again. Thank you.

Mark Smith: 1:36
Loving having you on the podcast and really seeing your journey has been such an excitement for me. For those that don't know you, let's start off with my standard intro questions, which is food, family and fun.

Parvez Ghumra : 1:52
Yeah, sure. So family means the world to me. So I live well, we live as an extended family and that's partly due to culture, but mostly down to upbringing. My parents brought me up in a way that you know we're looking after each other, looking out for each other, supporting each other. So that means basically my parents, my siblings, my siblings' respective partners, their children, my wife. We all live together or as close as possible to each other, within close proximity, and you know, if something happens to one person it kind of affects the whole family. So really really close-knit family like that.

Parvez Ghumra : 2:31
Food-wise, I'm a practiced Muslim, so anything halal is preferable. I enjoy my junk food, so anything halal is preferable, I enjoy my junk food. So the pizzas, burgers, steaks I do anything which is unhealthy and halal. It ticks all the boxes for me. Fun-wise, I tend to have most of my fun through work and community. At the moment I enjoy travelling as well. So a lot of my work, a lot of my travel so far has happened through community conferences and events and things.

Parvez Ghumra : 3:03
But I have been exploring the Middle East quite heavily in the last couple of years as well, mostly down to cultural ties. So I went to a couple of years ago I went to Iraq and Jordan to visit some of the sites there, and as part of that tour I was supposed to be going to Palestine as well, but this was all around the time that things really kicked off in that region, so unfortunately that part had to be cancelled. But, yeah, I've been exploring the wider kind of Middle East region, so I've been to pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, I've explored Egypt and Dubai and Abu Dhabi, turkey as well, so I'm just so in love with that region of the world. You know, the lifestyle, the culture, the food, the weather as well is amazing. So I try and kind of go out as much as I can, but yeah, that's when I'm not working. But yeah, majority of my travel is happening, as I say, through conferences at the moment.

Mark Smith: 4:04
Look at that. I've already learned so much more. So you've done a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Parvez Ghumra : 4:10
I've done a mini pilgrimage so it's not during the actual season of the annual big pilgrimage where you get millions, but it's like a mini version you can do at any time of the year. So I have. I did that a couple of years ago, yeah wow, wow was it.

Mark Smith: 4:28
You know what was the impact for you it's.

Parvez Ghumra : 4:32
It's it's totally life-changing because you know, um, as I was born into this kind of culture and family. So you hear about, you know the belief system, the culture and stuff as you're growing up, so it's kind of ingrained in your thinking and your mentality from a very young age. And then you hear about all the stories and you know the personalities and the history behind it all the personalities and the history behind it all. And then, after 40 years of your life, you go there in person and you go and see the places where those events and incidents have happened in history. It's a surreal experience. It is really really amazing. But yes, it's something that I wish I hadn't put off until so late in my life. I wish I'd done it earlier and now I just feel like going back. You know as much as I can and it's so, so important to life at the moment.

Mark Smith: 5:25
So, yeah, really loved it In all your travels? Has there been any? And that's funny, we get onto food any dish that's kind of stood out to you, that was unique, that is like wow, I could have that again or I could have that. A lot that you've come across.

Parvez Ghumra : 5:44
I don't really find a particular dish that kind of stands out. It's basically anything that tastes good and has the spices. I do love my spicy food, so if it hits the spot in that regard, then yeah it's good.

Mark Smith: 5:58
Next time we meet you need to introduce me to some spicy food, because it's never been part of my palate. I grow chilies. I grow Carolina Reaper chilies. These are the hottest chilies I grow, but I've never you know I've handled a lot of them and I haven't even been tempted to even have a little bite, because I've heard of you know what I have found. Actually, I will tell you something that I have found with growing my own chilies because they're not so, they're less hotter ones like, let's say, habaneros that I grow I have found that they're quite different than I suppose the bought chilies, which I feel were more Asian chilies that I grew up with, the bought chilies, which I feel were more Asian chilies that I grew up with.

Mark Smith: 6:41
And the difference is is that I find it hard when the heat of the food overpowers the flavors of the food. But what I have noticed is that with growing the chilies myself and using some of those and we add them to a dish, that the heat enhances the flavors, which is quite different and much more palatable, not like oh my gosh, this is just so hot I can't eat it. And where I've had kind of Cajun type food, gumbos and things like that and literally set my mouth on fire. Well, not literally, but you know it was so hot I'm like I can't even taste what I'm eating here. There's all I can feel is the burn. So, yeah, it's interesting spice.

Parvez Ghumra : 7:31
Yeah, yeah, no, that is interesting. I mean I've had a few mishaps, shall we say, of um getting too uh confident with the level of spice I can I can reach. So um, I went a bit um a couple of times. I went a bit um too high spice level and uh, it kind of came back to, came back to hurt me, um. So yeah, I do try and You're a bit more cautious now.

Mark Smith: 7:56
I guess Now you come from a post-dev background, right? And so I'm interested to know how did you get into Dynamics and particularly Dynamics CRM, back in the day? And the reason I ask that is that my experience with most NET developers, when they first come across it, they have an allergic reaction to it, you know. Yes, and because they don't have this unlimited surface from a NET perspective, there's constraints, and you know, back in the day, when you started, we had the software development kit, it was very prescriptive and what you could and could not do, you were never allowed to touch SQL directly. Things like that, you know, had to always go through the APIs and and and and the meta layer that Microsoft had in place. What drew you to the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 back in the day?

Parvez Ghumra : 8:50
As you say, I came from a bespoke NET development background. I took a year out of uni to kind of experience the software development professionally and that was my first kind of real experience of NET. That was in NET 1.0. And I kind of got fascinated by the idea of, you know, being able to develop database-driven web applications, those ASPNET, which had a SQL backend. And, you know, even in those days the low-code thing was starting to come in because you could build ASPNET controls, drag and drop and all this kind of stuff. So I did about a year of that and I really enjoyed it.

Parvez Ghumra : 9:34
And then I went back to university. I finished my studies but I wanted to get back into that as soon as I came out of university. But it was quite steep, the competition was, so I wasn't able to do it with that level of experience. So I kind of settled for working in data management for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and that involved basically database design and programming to support clinical trials, data assuring the quality of that data that comes out of clinical trials to support drug delivery. I did that for a couple of years and then I went back into the market and I got back into NET development and then that really accelerated my journey and growth in terms of understanding professional software development practices, things like source control and automated builds and deployments and unit testing and all this kind of stuff, but still very much in the bespoke space and web application development actually.

Parvez Ghumra : 10:35
And then I started to look for more opportunities for growth and I found what was advertised at the time as a NET developer position, but it turned out to be dynamic CRM development. So when I went through the selection process with this partner, I told him you know, this is not a technology I'm familiar with, I don't know this product and they were like OK, don't worry, we'll train you up, we'll give you the opportunities to to learn that. So I went in and, um, what I landed on was actually an aspnet custom web application project integrated with dynamic crm version 4. So, um, it was just using the dynamic scrum product as a backup database essentially, and I was doing like frontendnet application and using the SDK to integrate with that dynamic CRM system. But then I started to understand that there's a whole application around it. There's a whole business process flow thing.

Parvez Ghumra : 11:32
You can design workflow engine orchestrating all of that kind of stuff, the security of that data as well. There's a whole lot that goes behind the scenes as well. So I started to appreciate and learn security of that data as well. There's a whole lot that goes behind the scenes as well. So I started to appreciate and learn all of that and I started to understand. You know, this is more than just developing the web front end to it. You can build, you know, really enterprise grade stuff really quickly. You don't have to, you know, to start from scratch every time, thinking about your database schema and how your application is going to connect to your database and all this kind of stuff. So that really drew me in and I basically stayed with every product, every version of the product since then, so from 2011 to 2013, 2015, 2016, all the way to 365 and Power Platform now. So I've just enjoyed the productivity aspects of it being able to churn out stuff very quickly. That's what I've really enjoyed mostly.

Mark Smith: 12:29
Very interesting and, of course, I've been on a lot of that journey in the same type of timeframes. Shan McArthur was an MVP way back in the day. He was an MVP when I first became one and he owned a company called ADX Studio or he was one of the owners, a Canadian guy and because he sold that to Microsoft and our modern-day Power Pages that we have is an iterative on whatrosoft acquired from his company. One of the things that I don't know.

Mark Smith: 13:04
A lot of people know about shan. He was a big proponent of application life cycle management and doing builds that did involve human interaction when it, you know, automated, cetera and splitting down. Back in the day we had the package deployer or we had solutions and the idea that you could separate those out into their components and update elements of it, but repackage it and then push to server and the whole idea, being a more stable, consistent, had to pass the tests, et cetera, before deployment. And, of course, now we have a modern day thing like pipelines, we have application lifecycle management, we have Azure, devops and there's a lot of rigor to this process and this has been an area that you've spent a lot of time in. Why, why do you love it so much? What's the big deal for you when it comes to application lifecycle management?

Parvez Ghumra : 14:06
Yeah. So when I first started with as I mentioned earlier when I first started with NET development early in my career, I was still very much, you know, thrilled by the idea of being able to give commands to a computer and to make it do things. So I just wanted to cut code all day long. I didn't really appreciate that. You know, at the end of the day we need to try and deliver business value out of this thing. It's got to be beneficial to some sort of organization, right? But one thing that one of my mentors in the earlier part of my career told me, and I'm going to quote him here he says you can build the best software. In the earlier part of my career told me, and I'm going to quote him here he says you can build the best software in the world, if you can't reliably deliver it to your end user, that software is useless. And that was a light bulb moment for me because that kind of really put into perspective the importance of. You know, we need to be able to test this thing, we need to be able to get it into the right environment. And we need to be able to test this thing, we need to be able to get it into the right environment and we need to be able to ensure that we get the same version of that software consistently deployed across all of the target environments. Deployments to the point that, when I landed in Dynamics CRM development, all of this stuff was totally unheard of. People were shifting XML files from one environment to another. We were writing a script directly into a text box in a browser in Dynamics CRM version 4. And I was thinking to myself this can't be right. This is enterprise-grade software. We can't be doing this. Thinking to myself you know this can't be right. This is enterprise-grade software. We can't be doing this.

Parvez Ghumra : 15:39
So I started to do my research and I found folk in the community who were talking about some of this kind of stuff. And this was around the time of CRM 2011, when the solution framework first came out. And you know, as I say, a few folk in the community started opening up those opportunities around. You know, being able to export a solution, move it to a different environment, unpack it, commit it to a source control system, package it up and deploy it, and all this kind of stuff. So I started feeling my way into the community, trying to interact with these people to try and find a bit more about it. And you know, the tooling was there, it was possible to do.

Parvez Ghumra : 16:20
You know, all this time I thought it wasn't possible. It was finally possible and unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to actually work with those things for a long time until I landed on a project which really exposed me to that area properly, to the point that I could, you know, influence the customization, extension of that tooling to support those things. And I experienced it on enterprise-grade projects with Azure DevOps for a number of years on large projects and, more recently, with GitHub Actions as well now, and I'm really seeing the power of this tooling and really, really enjoying it. You mentioned Sean. He's an amazing guy. I met him in Vegas as well, and it was amazing guy. I met him in Vegas as well and it was amazing to just chat to him and be able to see some of the newer things that Microsoft are doing with source control, integration and all this kind of stuff as well. Really, really exciting stuff happening in that space.

Mark Smith: 17:41
Educate me, if you would, a little here. Is that the concept of SDK software development kit? We don't talk about that anymore, right? How come?

Parvez Ghumra : 17:54
I think it's largely down to the whole push of trying to do as much as possible using no code, low code, before you go down the route of the pro code options. And of course, it all comes down to basically, you know the business value, the maintainability of this thing, the supporting of it and the total cost of ownership. Essentially so the SDK, as the platform and the product, has evolved, we've got much more richer functionality and features that are available to us. As customizers, extenders, developers of this platform. We can achieve so much more with the no-code, low-code tooling now than we could in the past.

Parvez Ghumra : 18:35
In the past, every project pretty much had to have tons of plugins and custom workflow activities and JavaScript to be able to deliver something that was meaningful and of value. But now I'm working on an enterprise-grade project at the moment and I've been with this customer for over two years and we've only got three plugins. Almost everything else is you know workflows and business process flows and cloud flows and this kind of stuff. So it's not to say those skills around. You know data structures and programming constructs and the fundamentals around that are not necessary anymore. But you can apply all of those in the low-code tooling and you don't need to fall back to the pro code, the SDK type of stuff. That's where I think the real business is happening at the moment.

Mark Smith: 19:27
Around that time you talk about solutions, there is solutions still the correct term we would use for deploying custom something into particularly a model-driven app experience.

Parvez Ghumra : 19:39
Yeah, solution is still the container to take stuff between environments. Obviously, there are limitations in terms of what you can include in a solution. So when you start talking about enterprise-grade software, not everything that you need to deploy is going to be possible to include in a solution, so inevitably you're going to have dependencies on configuration data or, for example, services in Azure or applications in Azure. Those things are not solution aware. So, the way I look at it, alm is not about moving a solution between one environment to another. It's about looking at the holistic process that you need to do to get all of your artifacts into your target environments in a streamlined, robust, repeatable, error-free manner, and that may include database solutions, it may include portals, it may include configuration data and, as I mentioned, azure applications and services as well. So I like to look at the full spectrum of things when I talk about ALM.

Mark Smith: 20:39
So then Matt Barber right spectrum of things when I talk about alm. So then matt barber, right he. For me I feel like he was the, the, the, you know big advocator and probably builder to some degree of um, package deployer, um, which is where you take that kind of yes, there's code, but then there's data, there's configuration data, there might be data sets that that are part of making this. Is Package Deployer being superseded by ALM as well, or is that something you would still think about?

Parvez Ghumra : 21:08
Yeah, the Package Deployer is a good tool. It allows you to combine multiple different solutions, extend it even using your own deployment logic, embed configuration data in it if you want to. But even that only allows you to go so far. Things like, for example, portals, you can't include into a Packet Deployer package unless you extend it. You know the Azure components that are much easier to deploy, for example using things like Terraform or Bicep as a tool to do that. So the package deployer it does go a bit further. Unfortunately, the other thing is there's a bit of a limitation with the package deployer in that it only runs on Windows-based runners and agents. So if you have a requirement to run on Linux-based, then that's a limitation at the moment. We have to wait and see whether that's going to change in the future. So yeah, as I say, it's still one of the tools we use, but it's not the foolproof thing that solves all our issues.

Mark Smith: 22:15
Interesting, good chat. We're at time, but I'm going to have one last question. Take as long as you want to answer it. Tell me about your journey to becoming an MVP.

Parvez Ghumra : 22:25
Yeah, this is an interesting one. So, as you know, I've been in the space for a very long time and throughout that time, you know, the journey of actually learning has mostly been through my dependency on people like yourself in the community who've been sharing content and learnings with the wider community for a very long time. So I keep saying this to a lot of people if it wasn't for community, I wouldn't be where I am today. I've learned so much for the from the community, um and um.

Parvez Ghumra : 22:58
I went through the early years of my career where I was uh, I wasn't very actively contributing in the community. I was very passive. I would follow people and connect with them and reshare and like their things, but I wouldn't be posting out any of my own stuff. I was quite reserved in that regard. I started, or tried starting it a few times, but I always found excuses not to do it, whether that's time or the commitments or the imposter syndrome as well, not feeling as though I have anything to share. Until more recently, I started to become more and more active. I connected with more people. I started going to user groups and events and conferences. I started going to user groups and events and conferences, having those in-person connections, having that meaningful conversation with a person, just thanking them for the things that they've done to help me. And then the opportunity came about a year and a half ago where I just by chance got in connection with some other folk in the community who strongly advised me to try one more time to start doing this stuff. And you've probably seen from some of my blog posts, I started doing it.

Parvez Ghumra : 24:11
But what I find is that because I like to go above and beyond in giving a lot more to my audience than just and how-to, I like to tell them my thinking around how I get to the proposal I'm making to them in my blog post so that they take away something more than just a how-to, so that they can apply those principles themselves afterwards, learn from it and then do something similar when they come across a similar issue again. So that means I've spent an incredible amount of time putting that sort of post together and, being a developer, I find that context switching is really really killing my productivity. So it's hard for me to kind of find a large chunk of time to sit down and write that sort of blog post in a single sitting. So a lot of my contributions for that reason really come from helping other people and answering their questions and assisting them, whether that's through replies to forum threads or similar in the community, whatsapp groups and Discord servers. Even on LinkedIn posts, you'll see me often just chiming in into. You know people's questions that they raise or you know challenges that they experience with the platform and the technology.

Parvez Ghumra : 25:29
So I've been doing that for a few years now, actually, and a number of people actually reached out to me after seeing this sort of activity from me.

Parvez Ghumra : 25:39
They offered to kind of nominate me and I I always felt that, you know, I wasn't worthy of it. Um, so I've probably turned down you know, maybe four or five offers of nominations because I didn't feel I'd worthy of it until, um, one of the people in the community who's talking about the same sort of stuff I'm talking about and we were engaging on almost on a daily basis about alm and this kind of stuff Benedict Bergman actually and he managed to convince me to actually go for it around April this year and, yeah, I decided to give it a go even though I was convinced I wouldn't get it, but it worked out and, yeah, I was finally awarded in June and I'm incredibly honoured and humbled to get it. So, yeah, it's a really, really great opportunity. It opens up so many opportunities, you know, to get to know people, talk to them and, you know, collaborate with them on stuff as well. So it's a really good, really good place to be.

Mark Smith: 26:38
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. Thank you.