The Subtle Art of MCP

Practically AI is a new Manchester meetup for professional software engineers, engineering leaders, and software-engineering-adjacent professionals (platform, SRE/DevOps, product) who want to ship AI in production.

We’ll focus on applied, production-ready workflows: AI-assisted coding (Claude Code, Copilot), AI-driven dev environments and orchestration (MCP servers, CrewAI, LangGraph, PydanticAI), automated testing and CI/CD with AI, AI-powered ops/observability, and infrastructure automation.

Expect concrete demos, reusable code, and practical patterns you can put to work the next day.

Details

Topic: Mastering The Subtle Art Of MCP: Fine-Grained Control Beyond API Wrappers
Date: Thursday 18 September
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Location: Matillion, Stanley St, Salford M3 5GS

Talk

Led by Umbraco’s Phil Whittaker, this kick-off session looks at the Model Context Protocol (MCP) from a practical engineering perspective. Rather than stopping at “wrap an API,” we’ll explore how to design MCP servers that actually work in production – when to simplify schemas, how to shape tools and resources so models can use them effectively, and what to watch out for with context, pagination, or host quirks. These lessons come directly from building the Umbraco MCP server, now used by hundreds of developers in the Umbraco community.

By the end, you’ll have a clear sense of the common pitfalls and a set of proven design patterns you can apply to your own MCP projects. Expect real-world examples, reusable templates, and a short checklist to help you standardise how your team approaches MCP.

Agenda

18:30 – Doors, pizza & mingling
18:50 – Introductions
19:00 – Phil Whittaker: Mastering The Subtle Art Of MCP: Fine-Grained Control Beyond API Wrappers
19:45 – Q&A
19:55 – Open social & refreshments
20:30 – Close