Building Interactive MCP Tools with Elicitations: A Practical Guide

2025-07-11 Software Development Nick Perkins

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is revolutionising how we build AI tools, but a powerful new features recently added to the protocol will be a game changer: elicitations. These enable your MCP tools to have interactive conversations with users, gathering input dynamically rather than requiring all parameters upfront. Let me show you how to build engaging, interactive MCP tools using a practical ice cream topping recommender as our example. What Are MCP Elicitations? Continue reading

ORAS for Configuration Management

2024-06-29 Platform Engineering Nick Perkins

A challenge for any engineering team is handling configuration management in a secure and efficient way. Recently, I’ve explored using ORAS (OCI Registry As Storage), a tool which enhances OCI (Ope Container Initiative) registries by enabling them to store various artifacts, not just container images. What is ORAS? ORAS is an open source project which builds tools and libraries to enable using OCI registries to store any type of artifact, not just container images. Continue reading

A simple static blog comments system using Cloudflare Workers and D1

2023-04-12 Software Development Nick Perkins

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks off work, which has given me time to tinker with some different tech. For starters, I migrated this blog over to Hugo, a static site generated written in go. I’ve never had comments on this version of my blog, but I wondered how difficult it might be to roll my own system using Cloudflare Workers? This seemed like a good opportunity to play with one of Cloudflare’s newest offerings, D1. Continue reading

Infrastructure as code with Terraform

2021-04-18 Platform Engineering Nick Perkins

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on a project for a containerised orchestration platform using Infrastructure as Code. This has meant I’ve spent most of my time working with Terraform. What is Terraform? I could write a couple of paragraphs about what Terraform is and what it does, but I think they put it best: Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Continue reading

Using pyodbc in AWS Lambda functions

2019-07-21 Software Development Nick Perkins

This week I was working on an AWS Lambda function that needed to read and write from a legacy Microsoft SQL database. It’s written using the AWS Chalice framework and in local testing everything looked great. Not so much when we needed to deploy it to AWS for testing. Why? Most of the time that you include a python package for use in a lambda function, Chalice is able to package that into the deployment, and you’re good to go. Continue reading