Exploring artificial intelligence concepts, developments, and applications
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I was having a conversation recently and Vercel came up. The organisation I am currently working with has been exploring it as it seems to offer a lot of benefits for developers who have been let down by the promises of cloud. I have to admit that I had not really looked at Vercel before, so I decided to take a look and while I was at it ended up building and deploying a simple web application that has been on the bottom of my to-do list for a while.
I've been thinking about why network documentation always feels incomplete. You know the feeling - you've got spreadsheets full of device details, beautiful network diagrams, and configuration backups. But when something breaks at 3am, you're still calling Dave from the pub because he's the only one who knows why VLAN 247 exists.
The problem isn't that we don't document things. It's that we're only capturing the bottom layer of what we actually need.
While rage coding a python MCP server for NetBox I realised I needed a better way to test it. You can use CURL to make requests of course but it turns out that there is a handy node.js package that provides comprehensive test capabilities for MCP servers.
Netbox open sourced their STDIO MCP server a while back and I have been playing around with it since then. The installation requires some local dependencies and the setup process was a bit tricky, but I managed to get it up and running with some trial and error. I found it substantially harder to set up and wouldn't necessarily trust that the sort of people who would benefit from having access to it would be able to easily set it up so I wanted to create a more user-friendly installation process by building an MCP server that runs remotely as a proxy to the Netbox API.
I've had some concerns around Model Context Protocol being a new fad to put another front end on poorly managed data, like the search appliances Google sold a decade and a half ago, but I had a play with the MCP server for Netbox and it's pretty handy.
Since Anthropic open sourced the Model Context Protocol last year there have been lots of notable implementations across many areas of tech. Every day I seem to see a breathless introduction on LinkedIn to some new MCP front end to a service or dataset.
The topic of documentation always comes up in tech and it's one that has had a lot of attention in world of software development which has led to some excellent solutions. In the world of infrastructure, however, the solutions have not been as readily available or adopted.
I've put together a summary of some common search algorithms and how they work. This post covers key search algorithms used in computer science, explaining their approaches, strengths, weaknesses, and showing Python implementation examples.
Note for US readers: CV, or Curriculum Vitae, is the standard term in the UK and many other countries for what Americans call a resume. While traditionally a CV might be longer and more detailed than a resume, the terms are often used interchangeably in today's international job market.