Model Context Protocol — Workshop starter

Ideas

• Get public holidays: I have 15 remaining vacation days, use public holidays and optimize when to get them.
• Get HDD free space: How many copies of War and Peace I can store in the remaining space on my HDD?
• Convert timezones: What time in Valencia is 9am NY time? Here’s the agenda for the conference, show me the schedule in Sofia time.
• Get latest news from RSS: What are the positive news from CNN? Summarize what’s happening in the USA right now in the style of Bill Hicks.
• Get diff of pull request: Perform code review of this open source PR https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/55072 (hint if you append .diff to the URL you get the git diff patch)
• Get Core Web Vitals for an URL: How can I improve the performance of this website https://www.flywire.com

Resources

• https://modelcontextprotocol.io/
• https://github.com/yjacquin/fast-mcp
• https://github.com/geelen/mcp-remote

Getting started with plain Ruby

Install dependencies with:

gem install fast-mcp

Getting started with Sinatra

Install dependencies with:

bundle install

Start the server with:

ruby sinatra.rb

Getting started with Node

Install dependencies with:

npm install

Testing with MCP Inspector

Start the official MCP inspector:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

Open http://127.0.0.1:6274/ and connect to you server:

Plain Ruby

• transport: stdio
• command: ruby
• arguments: /path/to/server.rb

Sinatra

• transport: sse
• URL: http://127.0.0.1:4567/mcp/sse

Node

• transport: stdio
• command: node
• arguments: /path/to/build/index.js

Go to Tools and explore.

Testing with AI agent

You can use the following clients:

• Claude Desktop
• Visual Studio Code
• Cursor
• Zed

Follow its configuration to add the MCP server to the list of tools.