Authenticating MCPs: three ways we do it
MCP authentication gives us more than just security: we use it for dynamic tool registration and personalisation. Inspired by auth errors on the Kaggle MCP.
Matthew Johnston
Retail Data Science and Biology, PhD
Latest posts
Future Commerce Panel - eTail
No abstract
Digesting a codebase before a model reads it
Across every organisation I’ve worked in, documentation is either missing or, once written, out of date. So, we’ve stopped treating it as something people maintain and made agents regenerate it on every code change.
Country Wines (3) - Elderflower Champagne
The elderflowers are out - time for elderflower champagne. I wrote about this in the JIC Student Newsletter years ago, and it’s been on my wish list since then to get round to making (since 2019?).
Mapping all my runs in Cambridge to celebrate a 70-week streak
Strava proudly told me today I had achieved a 70-week activity streak; meaning I’ve recorded something every calendar week back to January 2025.
Fingerprinting every loyalty customer in 20 characters
How a tiny per-customer encoding turns our weekly basket analysis into real-time personalised recommendations - and now also powers voucher targeting.
A stateful MCP analyst: enforced agent curriculum and attention management
How we are changing BI at Jollyes Pets on a $10/month VM
Cambridge Half Marathon for Cambridgeshire Community Foundation
Ran the TTP Cambridge Half Marathon today in support of the Cambridgeshire Community Foundation, which raises funds and awards grants to local charities tackling inequality and disadvantage across the county.
Embeddings: LLM’s best kept secret?
Combining LLMs with traditional AI to solve new problems in minutes for pennies
Another stretch of 5k a day
Five and a half years after the first month of 5k a day, I went again - this time from mid-June through to the end of August. Two and a half months of (nearly) daily 5k+, with at least a monthly 10k thrown in too.