About
I’m Duarte Clemente, a Dataverse and Power Platform architect based near Lisbon, and founder of Simple Smooth Safe.
I spent the first part of my career as a civil engineer. Structures, loads, safety factors — you learn fast that materials don’t care about your intentions. Concrete has limits. Steel has limits. Your job is to know those limits, design within them, and leave a margin for the day something unexpected shows up.
Then I moved into Microsoft Dataverse and Power Platform architecture. Different material, same discipline.
Today I run Simple Smooth Safe, a solo consultancy. I design and build Power Platform systems for organisations that need them to keep working after the demo is over — when the data grows, the users multiply, and the original requirements turn out to be half the story.
Why “low-code that bears load”
Because I treat Power Platform the way I used to treat structural materials. It has real strengths and real limits: API throttling, delegation, storage costs, security boundaries. Pretending those limits don’t exist is how systems fail. Knowing them, designing within them, and refusing to decorate a weak structure with a nice UI — that’s the job. An app that collapses under the first serious data load isn’t a shortcut; it’s a structure built without checking the loads.
What I write about here
- Dataverse architecture — data modelling, security design, and the decisions that are expensive to reverse later.
- Power Platform limits and workarounds — where the platform bends, where it breaks, and what actually holds.
- When low-code is the right tool — and when it honestly isn’t.
No client names. The numbers are real: 3 million files, 15 of 23 tables left unlocked, an MVP in a month. Just the load calculations.
If you’re weighing a Dataverse design, or a system is buckling under load, see how I work or book 30 minutes below. For shop talk — Dataverse, Power Platform, or whether your next system should be low-code at all — I’m also on LinkedIn.