About

I’m Den Delimarsky. I am an engineer and product manager, currently working at Microsoft in the security organization helping the team ship secure and performant authentication and authorization libraries. I started my engineering journey all the way back in the 90s, with a 386 box that was barely enough to run DOS games (I’ve upgraded since then). I’ve spent plenty of time writing code in Visual Basic 6.0 but for more than two decades now I am writing C# and Python. I’m learning C++, Rust, and Go when I need to really get out of my comfort zone.

I genuinely enjoy mixing product sense with putting hands on the keyboard and getting code out to the public - that’s the reason I steered my career towards developer tools.

What projects do you build and maintain? #

If you’re on Windows and felt like the caffeinate tool from macOS is missing, I built (and continue building) PowerToys Awake. I am also making my Windows configuration settings public to help Windows developers have a clean and robust dev box.

As a product manager (PM), I am also keenly aware of just how little comprehensive guidance there is on what it means to be a great PM, which led me to starting an open-source list of resources to help aspiring and more veteran PMs learn the craft.

I use a Stream Deck fairly regularly but wanted to make sure that I have full control of the device. That’s why I reverse engineered its USB protocol and built a .NET library around it.

Since 2020 I am running a podcast that provides a no-bullshit view on how to grow your career in tech. I’ve been fortunate to be joined by some excellent folks, such as Jeff Atwood, Sam Saccone, Gennadiy Korol, Chris Coyier, Camille Fournier, Charlie Kindel, and Mayuko Inoue. You can also check out the interviews on YouTube if video is your thing.

If you like Seinfeld, you might like his recent transition to tech.

I like blogging and people having their own personal spaces on the Internet outside the scope of big platforms (you can follow this blog in your RSS reader) so I started an aggregator of great personal blogs to follow.

Have you done anything before? #

There are a few things that I’ve done in the past professionally:

• I’ve worked at Netlify as a Group Product Manager, leading the product management team in building out the ecosystem muscle for the web platform. This work was also covered on VentureBeat.
• I took the role of a Technical Advisor to the Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft, helping craft a strategy for open-source project engagement.
• I was a Senior Product Manager - Technical at Amazon Web Services, building third-party API integrations with EventBridge.
• I led the effort on the docs.microsoft.com team (at Microsoft, of course) in building a robust, reliable, and scalable API documentation automation and code sample infrastructure. Tools I and my team built are still in production to this day.
• I worked as a Product Manager on the Outlook team at Microsoft, shipping Outlook Groups to customers around the globe.
• I collaborated with the Coding4Fun folks at Microsoft in building a demo game that showed how to use the Windows DirectX APIs in the newly minted modern (formerly known as Metro) apps.

Some of the projects that I built outside of work, that are no longer maintained, include:

• A command line interface (CLI) tool that can work with any voice-to-text provider.
• A utility for monitoring weather in the Windows 7 taskbar. It even got some coverage on Lifehacker.
• A Windows Phone app that connected to the undocumented Zune API to get personal stats.
• Beem - another Windows Phone app to stream EDM music directly to your phone. It got coverage on Windows Central.
• Yet another EDM-related Windows Phone app for keeping up with a music podcast, which also was covered on Windows Central.
• A reverse engineered client for Snapchat on Windows Phone.
• A multi-tool for Halo Infinite players called OpenSpartan Workshop. It’s an unofficial companion app that stores data locally and allows anyone to query it from a SQLite database on their computer. The beauty of this approach is that it enables much richer insights than what the API provides out-of-the-box. You can see some of these experiments in a Jupyter notebook I put together.
• I reverse engineered the Halo Infinite REST API so that I could easily track and analyze my match stats (that ended up in its own .NET library at the time).

When I have time, I also speak at technical events and on podcasts. Those include:

• Earlier in 2024, I sat down with Kirupa to talk about what makes successful products successful.
• In 2024, I presented at Microsoft Build in Seattle on the topic of authentication brokers and how Microsoft Entra ID enables SSO scenarios for third-party customers.
• In 2023, I, along with my engineering manager counterpart, delivered a session at Microsoft Build to talk about how authentication brokers will change the security landscape for public client applications.
• In 2021, I was on Muko’s Corner talking about my long journey to Microsoft and more with Mayuko Inoue.
• In 2021 I joined the Coffee and Open Source podcast as a guest to talk about my career.
• I’ve presented on docs being a core part of the product at Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, BC, Canada in August of 2018. You can also find a related lightning talk on YouTube.
• I talked about testing code with containers at the Global Azure Bootcamp in Vancouver, BC, Canada in April of 2018.
• In April of 2017 I’ve chatted on the MS Dev Show about documentation tooling and infrastructure.

Contact #

I love connecting with folks that read this blog or have anything to chat with me about. Send me a note: [email protected].

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

Disclaimer #

All opinions presented on this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. It works the other way around too.