Hi, I'm Den 👋

Principal Product Engineer, Tinkerer, Nerd, Trail Explorer.

I am a super-technical product engineer who is all about solving complex technical problems, reverse-engineering things, and documenting my experiences. Some of the highlights include:

🚧 Helping secure and build developer tools and AI-powered experiences that make engineers more productive.
🎙️ Recording a podcast where I talk to notable folks about unconventional career paths.
☕ Building a utility to keep your Windows machine awake.
🌱 Growing a list of resources to help product managers get better.
🪐 Maintaining a Halo-related hobby project.
🪨 Tinkering with USB protocols from a popular button box.

You can read more about my work and more on the About page.

Recent

Acquiring Tokens For Non-Graph APIs In Azure Functions

March 18, 2025·1639 words

I had a customer conversation earlier last week where an interesting scenario popped up - they were using Entra ID to protect their API hosted in Azure Functions, and wanted to make sure that they can use the access token for other Azure API access. The authentication they used was what’s known as Easy Auth.

Using Microsoft Entra ID To Authenticate With MCP Servers Via Sessions

March 14, 2025·1712 words

Just a week ago I was talking about an approach to authenticating into MCP servers with Entra ID. While the approach was OK as a prototype, it had some interesting aspects to it that might or might not work depending on the context. But what if we could improve this a bit?

Using Microsoft Entra ID To Authenticate With Model Context Protocol Servers

March 5, 2025·4175 words

Not too long ago, Anthropic put forward a draft specification that outlines how authentication and authorization works in the context of MCP. It’s pretty vanilla in terms of what you’d expect from an OAuth-based implementation, but it gets a bit trickier if we try and integrate Microsoft Entra ID into it.

The Missing Intro To Flexible Federated Identity Credentials

February 28, 2025·2429 words

Entra ID has this thing called “flexible Federated Identity Credentials”, or “flexible FIC” for short. You might be confused a bit by the very long name, but behind the term is a really powerful capability that I hope to cover well enough in this post.

How I Automated My Podcast Transcript Production With Local AI

February 23, 2025·2594 words

I’ve been running a podcast for close to half a decade now, called The Work Item. Publishing new episodes generally takes a bit of time because of all the prep work that needs to happen beforehand. I now get to use AI to automate a pretty tedious part of the process.