Writing

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

DeckSurf, my open-source SDK that covers the reverse-engineered protocol for interacting with Stream Deck devices, is now more-or-less complete in terms of devices it can identity and run against.

If you are a software engineer, product manager, data scientist, or in any other role that deals with technology and you are not using Large Language Models, you are missing out on some key productivity boosters. Consider this anecdata, but what I managed to accomplish with my podcast website, arguably a relatively simple project, is a bellwether for things to come across the industry.

I am always on the lookout for ways to make my life easier with the help of computers, and one of the more recent things that I started using is really helping me in this domain - the @vision extension for GitHub Copilot.

A little experiment in using GitHub Copilot REST APIs inside GitHub Actions to avoid manually parsing text bodies.

What’s a start to the year without some changes. Well, at least for me and my family the change meant a switch of teams and organizations within Microsoft.