Blame us
Two friends who met in São Paulo back in 2012. João writes about Azure, Bruno covers Cisco Collaboration — and yes, there's plenty of banter about football in between.
João Paulo Costa
My name is Joao Paulo Costa, originally from Brazil and now based in the United Kingdom. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology and bring over 18 years of professional experience in IT infrastructure and cloud technologies.
I began my career in 2007 as an intern in a major Brazilian energy company with more than 5,000 employees, where I quickly developed a strong focus on Microsoft technologies. Over the years, I have specialised in Microsoft solutions such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, Exchange Server, Intune. I also work extensively with automation and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, PowerShell, and Azure CLI, alongside DevOps practices such as CI/CD pipelines and GitHub Actions.
Since moving to the UK in 2019, I have been working as a Cloud Engineer in a multinational organisation. My current focus is on Azure cloud architecture, automation, DevOps practices, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep), PowerShell scripting, and process optimisation.
Beyond my professional role, I am passionate about giving back to the community. Through this blog, I share step-by-step tutorials, real-world scenarios, and best practices on Azure to help IT professionals and organisations adopt Azure technologies more effectively.
Bruno Lopes
Hello, my name is Bruno Falco, Brazilian, based in the United Kingdom. In Brazil, I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and post-graduated in Network Engineering.
With around 15 years of experience in IT, I started my career as an intern in a Global Outsourcing company and since then I have been focused on Cisco Collaboration and its platforms. Later on I moved to the UK to work for a Global company, where I am responsible for managing all the Collaboration infrastructure, which includes Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Contact Centre Express, CME, Voice Gateways and Sonus SBC.
I have also started learning and deploying projects using Python, Flask and HTML, having the opportunity to create some interesting automation and dashboards, integrating them with UCCX Scripts and CUCM.
We started Get Practical to share knowledge with the Microsoft and Cisco communities — and honestly, to learn more ourselves. There's something about trying to explain a concept clearly that forces you to understand it better. We met in São Paulo in 2012, both ended up in the UK, and stayed good friends — plenty of barbecues and football arguments along the way. The blog was just a natural extension of that.