The MCP Reference Server You Should Have Been Building From

The MCP Server That Teaches by Example

Most MCP servers solve a problem. This one is the solution — to the harder problem of figuring out how to build one correctly.

The Derekhuynen MCP Server is a production-grade reference implementation in TypeScript, designed not just to run, but to be read, cloned, and templated. It's the kind of project that shows up in your bookmarks the moment you start wondering why your own MCP server keeps falling apart at the edges.

On the surface, this is a personal portfolio server — an AI-queryable interface into one developer's professional identity. That sounds narrow. It isn't.

The server exposes 6 tools covering every layer of a professional profile: identity, contact, skills, projects, experience, and keyword search. The get_experience tool alone supports three optional filters — skill, employer, and recentOnly — making it genuinely useful for targeted queries, not just data dumps.

Then there are the 2 resources: profile://summary and profile://resume — URI-addressable blobs that let MCP clients pull structured profile data directly. And one prompt: recruiter_pitch, which generates a recruiter-facing pitch for a given role. That last one is a small detail that signals a lot — this server was built to be used, not just demonstrated.

Here's what separates this from the typical "I made an MCP server for my side project" repo: the author built it with two transports — stdio and Streamable HTTP — sharing a single core logic layer. That's a legitimate architectural decision that most tutorial projects skip entirely.

Strict TypeScript types throughout. 42 tests. Docker support. CI pipeline. These aren't features you add to a reference project as an afterthought — they're the whole point. When you're templating a new server, you want to start from something that already passes a CI run, not something that "works on my machine."

The server scores 90/100 on MCPpedia's quality rubric — an unusually high mark. Here's where those points come from:

The 30/30 on security is worth calling out specifically. That's a ceiling score, and it reflects the kind of server you'd actually trust to handle queries in a real deployment — not a demo that skips input validation because "it's just a portfolio."

Let's be direct about the audience here.

If you're building your first MCP server, this is the most instructive starting point available. You can diff your implementation against it and immediately see what you're missing.

If you're a developer who wants an AI-queryable version of your resume, fork it, swap out the profile data, and you have something genuinely useful — an LLM can now navigate your career history better than most keyword-matching ATS systems.

If you're on a team standardizing how you build MCP servers, this is the template to argue for. It covers the decisions that matter: transport layer, typing discipline, test coverage, containerization.

The Derekhuynen MCP Server currently sits at 0 GitHub stars — which tells you something about how recently it landed, not about its quality. A score of 90/100, dual transports, 42 tests, and a clean architecture are not things you stumble into.

Clone it before you build your next MCP server from scratch. You'll spend less time debugging transport edge cases and more time shipping the thing that actually matters.