One of the more interesting additions I’ve made recently to the Line of Succession website is support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). If you’ve spent any time around AI tooling recently, you’ve probably seen people talking about MCP. It’s often described as “USB for AI”, which is perhaps a little overblown, but the basic […]
One of the defining characteristics of a good programmer is an instinct for keeping implementation details in the correct layer of an application. That sounds abstract, but it turns out to explain a huge amount of the progress we’ve made in software development over the last twenty-five years. And nowhere is that clearer than in […]
Every month, I write a newsletter which (among other things) discusses some of the technical projects I’ve been working on. It’s a useful exercise — partly as a record for other people, but mostly as a way for me to remember what I’ve actually done. Because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s very easy to […]
Every so often, a new data serialisation format appears and people get excited about it. Recently, one of those formats is **TOON** — Token-Oriented Object Notation. As the name suggests, it’s another way of representing the same kinds of data structures that you’d normally store in JSON or YAML: hashes, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and […]
About eighteen months ago, I wrote a post called On the Bleading Edge about my decision to start using Perl’s new class feature in real code. I knew I was getting ahead of parts of the ecosystem. I knew there would be occasional pain. I decided the benefits were worth it. I still think that’s […]
