2 posts tagged with "Architecture"

I was today years old when I learned how WebSockets and CORS really work. And: how CORS can be implemented in a non‑standard (but arguably better) way.

One of the "Larry-isms" that my family and coworkers are tired of hearing is, "You can't be better unless you are different." It's not an endorsement for being different just to be different but rather, to look for opportunities to deviate from the norm when you think you have found a better way to do something. I always follow it with a statement that just because you think you have a better way doesn't mean that you actually do — and that may very well be the case with what I did today.

I implemented a non-standard way of handling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in Lumenize. You be the judge of whether or not it's better.

Remember that childhood game called "broken telephone" where we lined up in a circle with our friends. Then, one person would whisper something into their neighbor's ear, and they would in turn whisper it into the next friend's ear until you completed the circle? If you were lucky, you might land beside the person you secretly liked—the tiny thrill of whispering anything into their ear. The lesson was that every translation from brain to words and back again was just a little bit lossy. Cumulatively, what came out the other end was nothing like the original message.

Software systems, and APIs in particular, are no different. Every layer of translation risks just a little bit of loss in fidelity. This is nowhere more true than in the realm of types, schemas, validation, and code generation — the same patch of cognitive quicksand occupied by TypeScript, JSON Schema, Ajv, Zod, and friends.

MCP is all about context portability: moving structured data democratically across agents, runtimes, and languages. The type/schema has to remain the same throughout the journey around the circle of friends. Tooling decisions have very real consequences for portability and correctness. So imagine my surprise when I discovered the Babel of type/schema translations running in MCP stacks today.

Somewhere between recess and real life we all learned the difference between a childhood crush and a partner you can build with. Flash is fun on the playground; fidelity gets you into adulthood. With Lumenize, I wasn’t looking for puppy love. I was looking for a commitment that would survive different runtimes, languages, and teams.