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Hi, I'm Den 👋

Sharing my love for computers, reverse engineering, machine learning, and Halo.

I am an engineer and product manager. I help build software that makes other software more secure, record a podcast where I interview notable folks about their career lessons, build a utility to keep your Windows machine awake, maintain a list of resources to help product managers grow, and tinker with USB data from a popular button box. In the past I’ve reverse engineered and documented the Halo Infinite REST API.

You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News.

Recent

A New PowerToys Awake Is Out

·479 words
The new PowerToys are out (we’re at version 0.70.0) and with it comes a new version of Awake, the caffeinate tool that folks are used to on a Mac, brought to life on Windows.

Solving The Funky 0x8007007B Windows Activation Error

·565 words
I was recently setting up a new Windows machine for work - a desktop machine that actually has enough storage for me to run local SQL experimentation. I diligently followed the steps to create a bootable Windows 11 Enterprise USB, got the disks properly formatted, installed the OS, and tried to start customizing everything to my liking only to hit a brick wall.

Just Works For Me

·1640 words
If there would be some absurd world where I would be able to choose two pieces of the common vocabulary that should just vanish, it would be “just” and “works for me.” We, folks in tech, got way too comfortable throwing these around.

Recipes For Product Failure: Obsess Over Competitors

·1068 words
If product management was ever perfected and applied evenly to every single company and industry, we’d likely swim in products that solve all our problems. Unfortunately, good product management is unevenly distributed and often takes on patterns and practices that are very far from optimal.

Bulk Updates To Azure Blob Storage Cache Control Metadata

·678 words
I host media content (all images and videos) related to this blog in an Azure Blob Storage account that is exposed publicly via a CDN. It’s the most cost-efficient way to do it for the scenarios I have in mind and also given the fact that the rest of the website and related infrastructure lives in Azure (yes, it finally outgrew GitHub Pages).