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.

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.