Filed from Floor 7½ · October 2026

Welcome to Floor 7½

The ceilings are a bit low, the coffee is questionable, and it is where the interesting stuff happens: between the official floors.

I am Markus. I have spent 25+ years building things at IBM, and lately that is mostly MCP servers, AI agents and watsonx Orchestrate. I post here about what I build, the code behind it, and what I learned along the way, including what broke.

No polished happy-path demos. If something returned 201 Created and still went to the wrong person, you will read about it here.

Start here

More from the floor

• 
  Article · October 2026

  Too Many Tools Spoil the Agent

  Scaling an MCP server isn’t about traffic. It’s about how many choices you hand the model.

• 
  Essay · October 2026

  The Great Inversion

  How code went from cathedral to sketch, and what’s still left for us humans.

• 
  Article · 20 min · October 2026

  From Scratch to watsonx Orchestrate

  What building MCP servers taught me — and how the same server plugs into watsonx Orchestrate.

• 
  Talk · MCP Dev Summit Toronto

  MCP as a Platform

  What I learned building a portfolio of MCP servers. One server teaches you the protocol. A portfolio teaches you what MCP actually is.

• 
  Hands-on · 14 labs

  WXO Labs: from zero to hero

  Build your first Python tool, then MCP, SSO and enterprise integrations in watsonx Orchestrate. Every lab is something you build.

• 
  Open source · Code

  mcp-ticket-demo

  Every example from the talk in one small MCP server you can clone tonight. It is also where the 201 Created that went to the wrong person was born.

Mind your head

That is the floor. New posts land whenever something works, breaks, or does both. If you are stuck on something, a tool that will not import, an agent that picks the wrong tool, a 403 that makes no sense, find me on LinkedIn. I like to help.

No bug 🐛 too small, no syntax too weird
Cheers,
Markus

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