Building one MCP server teaches you the protocol. Building five teaches you what MCP actually is.

Over the past year I've built and published multiple open-source MCP servers across different domains — cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, AI workflows. Each one taught me something the previous one didn't. This talk is about what I learned across all of them.

We'll get into the patterns that showed up again and again: how tool design evolves as your server grows beyond 3 or 4 tools, what's worth sharing across servers and what isn't, how to write a README that means developers can actually use your server without asking you for help, and the one thing that keeps biting me — discoverability. Where does someone find your MCP server today? Honestly, there's no great answer yet. We'll talk about that too.

All the servers are open source at markusvankempen.github.io — this is a practitioner's talk, not a whiteboard session.

If you're building your second or third MCP server and want to go faster, this one's for you.