Track_2
I didn't get MCP, so I built my way through it
MCP is everywhere in AI tooling, but what actually is it?
This talk follows one developer's honest journey: not understanding MCP, deciding to build an inspector to figure it out, and discovering something much bigger along the way. We'll walk through building a Ruby MCP inspector gem from scratch using Rails 8: inspecting server communication, mapping available tools, and leveraging Ruby's metaprogramming for protocol exploration.
Then comes the plot twist, what if your Rails app could read available MCP servers and generate its own UI dynamically? Add a new server, get a new interface. No redeploy.
You'll leave with a clearer mental model of MCP and a concrete example of Rails 8 as a first-class AI development platform.
This talk follows one developer's honest journey: not understanding MCP, deciding to build an inspector to figure it out, and discovering something much bigger along the way. We'll walk through building a Ruby MCP inspector gem from scratch using Rails 8: inspecting server communication, mapping available tools, and leveraging Ruby's metaprogramming for protocol exploration.
Then comes the plot twist, what if your Rails app could read available MCP servers and generate its own UI dynamically? Add a new server, get a new interface. No redeploy.
You'll leave with a clearer mental model of MCP and a concrete example of Rails 8 as a first-class AI development platform.
About_the_speaker
Enrique Mogollan
Software Engineer · Handshake
Enrique is a software engineer with experience in backend systems, web applications, and open-source projects. He's passionate about collaborative coding and believes pair programming is the secret sauce for great software. He thought dogs were better than cats until one adopted him.