Phil Whittaker : 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.

We are building a friendly AI practitioner community in Manchester—and we’re actively looking for speakers. If you’ve got a talk, demo, or war story on these topics, get in touch and let’s get you on the schedule.

Phil Whittaker: Mastering The Subtle Art Of MCP: Fine-Grained Control Beyond API Wrappers

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.

Who Should Attend:

Software engineers, tech leads, platform/SRE and DevOps shipping AI-enabled features or building internal developer tooling. If you’ve tried MCP (or plan to) and want pragmatic guidance you can apply, you’ll fit right in.

Why It’s Worth Attending:

You’ll get real patterns, not hype—how to structure tools/resources/prompts so models behave, how to avoid context bloat, and how to design for different hosts (e.g., Claude Desktop vs custom agents). Plus, meet peers solving the same production problems in Manchester’s engineering community.

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

Venue: Two New Bailey St, Stanley St, Salford M3 5GS

Entry: Upon arrival please check in at reception and you’ll be directed to the Meetup.