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Tom Johnson

Thomas Floyd Johnson was an American composer and music critic associated with minimalism. After a religious upbringing in Colorado, he… more

Tom Johnson
H-index: 12
Art 25%
Political science 22%
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
How much time do you have? I feel like the risk zone is anywhere between 3-6 hours.

Reposted by: Tom Johnson

multiplayer.app
Sometimes the frontend data isn’t enough.

Sometimes (okay, always) you also want to know what happened in the backend.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Devs: I’ll just make a small change.

QA tickets: 🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Start simple, release gradually, and let user feedback guide you. Less is more when it comes to MCP.

❓ Curious what others are seeing: what’s the most *useful* MCP tool you’ve come across so far?
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
For us, that meant focusing on two high-value use cases:

1️⃣ Fixing bugs (where we can pipe full-stack session data directly into an AI tool)

2️⃣ Building features (where annotations/sketches from a session replay add the needed context to AI prompts).
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Don’t just map your API 1:1 into MCP tools. That creates context bloat, and LLMs aren’t great at wiring together dozens of endpoints. Instead, scope tools tightly around developer intent.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
MCP servers are everywhere right now. But most are collecting dust.

The key lesson we’ve learned at Multiplayer: scope matters. 🧵
doerrfeldbill.bsky.social
What's it like launching an #MCP server into the wild? My latest DirectorPlus edition via @leaddev.com brings in Thomas Johnson, co-founder and CTO of Multiplayer, to discuss helpful lessons learned releasing their MCP server.
leaddev.com/ai/lessons-l...
Lessons learned launching an MCP server
Steps you can follow if you're thinking about launching your own MCP server.
leaddev.com

Reposted by: Tom Johnson

doerrfeldbill.bsky.social
What's it like launching an #MCP server into the wild? My latest DirectorPlus edition via @leaddev.com brings in Thomas Johnson, co-founder and CTO of Multiplayer, to discuss helpful lessons learned releasing their MCP server.
leaddev.com/ai/lessons-l...
Lessons learned launching an MCP server
Steps you can follow if you're thinking about launching your own MCP server.
leaddev.com
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
I repeat. DON’T UPVOTE. I don’t care about that.

I just want to hear your feedback:

👉 Would you use this mainly for debugging, testing, or feature development?

👉 Have you tried session replays before? What worked, what didn’t?
multiplayer.app
Multiplayer is live on Product Hunt 🚀 Here’s how you can support us:

1️⃣ DON’T UPVOTE (yes, you’ve read it right)

2️⃣ COMMENT with your feedback

Upvotes? Nah. Feedback? Yes.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
I repeat. DON’T UPVOTE. I don’t care about that.

I just want to hear your feedback:

👉 Would you use this mainly for debugging, testing, or feature development?

👉 Have you tried session replays before? What worked, what didn’t?
multiplayer.app
Multiplayer is live on Product Hunt 🚀 Here’s how you can support us:

1️⃣ DON’T UPVOTE (yes, you’ve read it right)

2️⃣ COMMENT with your feedback

Upvotes? Nah. Feedback? Yes.

Reposted by: Tom Johnson

multiplayer.app
Multiplayer is live on Product Hunt 🚀 Here’s how you can support us:

1️⃣ DON’T UPVOTE (yes, you’ve read it right)

2️⃣ COMMENT with your feedback

Upvotes? Nah. Feedback? Yes.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
But I also know that “I promise it's better” isn’t always enough when you’re busy and already juggling priorities.

So I’d love to hear: what’s made *you* drop a tool that was working and try a new one? And what made the switch worth it?
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Is it word of mouth, seeing a demo, hitting a pain point one too many times, or just plain curiosity?

From my side: I genuinely believe we’re building something that saves time, reduces context switching, and brings all your data into one place.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
I build developer tools for a living, and I’ve been wondering about this a lot: once you have a workflow that “works well enough,” what’s the trigger to get you to switch to something different and/or (possibly) better?
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Is it ever really possible to get a dev to switch tools once it "works well enough"?
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
If you haven't yet, I highly recommend checking this collection of reference implementations for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). 👇
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Most “session replay” tools show you what happened in the browser.

Multiplayer shows you what happened across your entire stack.
multiplayer.app
Full stack session recordings: record. code. fix. repeat.

Reposted by: Tom Johnson

multiplayer.app
Full stack session recordings: record. code. fix. repeat.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
‼️ I’ll be giving this talk again virtually on Friday, September 12 at 10:00am PDT. If you’ve ever struggled with API docs that don’t keep up with your system, I’d love for you to join.

apiworldcloudxdataweek2025.sched.com/event/24i0V/...
API World + CloudX + DataWeek 2025: [Virtual] PRO Session (API): Stop Sendin...
View more about this event at API World + CloudX + DataWeek 2025
apiworldcloudxdataweek2025.sched.com
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
What actually works?

✔️ Sandboxes you can try instantly
✔️ Executable notebooks
✔️ Embedded tests
✔️ Self-validating examples that evolve with your code

When docs are interactive and accurate by design, developers integrate faster, support load drops, and teams move forward with fewer blockers.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
I had the chance to speak at API World 2025 last week on a topic I’ve seen frustrate teams for years: API documentation.

Because let’s face it: most developers don’t want to read static docs. Outdated Postman collections and PDF references slow everyone down.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
What teams really need is ✨ end-to-end visibility, tied to real user and system behavior. ✨ 

The ability to interrogate a flow as it happened, with all the context in one place: frontend actions, backend traces, logs, payloads, headers.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Think of when a specific user action triggered a downstream failure, when a service degraded only under a rare traffic pattern, when an integration silently drifted.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
Dashboards are great at showing symptoms: CPU is spiking, latency is up, error rates crossed a threshold.

But when you need to understand why dashboards alone don’t cut it. 🧵
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
✈️ I’ll be in Santa Clara, CA, from Thursday Sept 4th and Friday Sept 5th to speak at the API World conference.

If you’re curious about how full stack replays can cut your team’s MTTR and development time, I’d love to grab a coffee and swap notes.

DM me if you’ll be around.
tomjohnson3.bsky.social
This is why I’m so passionate about full-stack session recordings. Instead of shifting through tons of telemetry data and multiple tools, you get a single replay that shows you exactly what the user did, what the frontend rendered, what the backend returned, and how your system behaved. End to end.

References

Fields & subjects

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