Security and privacy, in practice
I didn't need an MCP gateway, I needed a smaller credential
I put an MCP server on the public internet so an AI client could file todos onto my private kanban board. The interesting part wasn't the protocol — it was making the dangerous call unrepresentable.
1 Aug 2026
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7 min read
Shipping an AI feature into my own product
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Part 3
Adding a job description match to my AI Concierge
I added job-description matching to the AI concierge on my career site. It shipped with no new bean, no new table, and no migration — because the leverage was in a seam I'd already built. A design note on shared streaming cores, streamable structured output, and treating a pasted JD as hostile.
13 Jul 2026
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11 min read
Shipping an AI feature into my own product
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Part 2
I red-teamed my own AI concierge
My site has an 'Ask Zakaria' AI box that answers untrusted recruiter input. So I spent an afternoon trying to break it — prompt leaks, tool-call injection, XSS, a cross-language jailbreak. Here's what held, and why the real defense isn't a clever prompt.
7 Jul 2026
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5 min read
The Model Context Protocol, hands on
Building an MCP Tool with Spring Boot AI
How I turned Apache Kafka into a set of tools an AI client can call — using Spring AI's MCP server, a handful of @Tool methods, and one ugly-but-necessary servlet filter.
28 Jun 2026
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5 min read