markjgsmith

Web development treadmill

Everytime I get to a point with my web development skills where I'm comfortable, a new tech pops up that is the new thing, which is absolutely vital, without which you will never get a job. This has been happening since as far back as I can remember. I spent years learning HTML/JS/CSS, that's par for the web development course obviously, but then there was Python and Bash, and of course you need SQL and you should probably learn MySQL because that‘s the best open source database out there. And you're basically ready to go, I mean you‘ve been going for years at this point, but yeah you are ready. Oh yeah actually we forgot to mention...

MongoDB, Github Actions, Docker, React, GraphQL, Postgres, Nginx, VSCode, OAuth, Typescript, Kubernetes, Serverless. And all the other things I have learnt that aren‘t such well known things. It never ends.

Anyway I was looking at MCP, well sure seems like this is the new hotness. REST APIs, ppppfff forget about it, it's all about putting an MCP server on front of your data now, and writing MCP clients to access the data via LLMs.

Look at how many implementations there are and MCP only just got announced it seems like a few months ago. It's insane.

One day they will just be like yeah you gotta learn the entire encyclopedia britanica off by heart word for word, and still nobody will give you a job.

I do quite want to setup an MCP server though.

Oh yeah do you even VIM?

Do I even VIM. Hello? :set spell, :wq #

Matt Odell on what you need [26:56] to set yourself up to be fully sovereign in the most privacy preserving way with Bitcoin [26:56]:

"Bitcoin Core or Nots, Electrum Server, Mempool Space. And boom you are off to the races".

Obvs this is if you are quite technical or a bit adventurous. #

I just installed Primal which is a Nostr client. Very smooth signup and onboarding. I already had a Nostr account but the signup sets you up with like 150 accounts based on your interests, and so I figured might aswell go with that. I don't think anybody was following my original Nostr account in any case.

It's nice to have lots of messages to read in my feed. That's probably the main reason I never checked Nostr before, I only had a few accounts I was following. I also couldn't figure out how to find people to follow. I had previously setup a nip5 so I guess I'll need to do that again.

Anyway here's my new npub. #

REST-based MCP

Me and Gemini spent a few hours going over MCP earlier. I asked loads of questions, read lots of documentation and examples, and it became quite clear that MCP is basically just a meta layer on front of REST, which could very easily just be implemented in REST. Gemini of course was very bullish on MCP.

Gemini then had the genius idea of a new protocol, called "REST based MCP". It‘s absolutely genius. And so we wrote a specification.

Behold the specification for REST-based MCP, and if you are curious about how it all went down, then have a skim through the full chat thread, which I think is quite funny. #