chat & code

RivieraDev 2025 – Day 2 Highlights

🔑 Keynote: The Cost of Inaction – Quentin Adam & Nicolas Leroux

The second day of RivieraDev opened with an inspiring keynote by Quentin Adam and Nicolas Leroux on a critical theme: “The Cost of Inaction.”

Ken Olsen (1977):
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
A historic underestimation — just like Kodak, who invented the digital camera but didn’t win the market on it, an example of shooting yoursekf in the foot.

Another major example: Blockbuster, which declined a partnership with Netflix — and is now long gone.

📉 Activity vs Purpose

It’s easy to get stuck in the comfort zone, buried in daily operations.
Companies like BlackBerry missed the iPhone revolution by clinging to outdated paradigms.

💸 COI vs ROI

Don’t confuse Cost of Innovation (COI) with Return on Investment (ROI).
The longer you wait to innovate, the higher the Cost of Inaction.
Hidden costs include: tech debt, lack of ownership, and stagnation.

Reminder: Not choosing is still a choice — and often the most expensive one.

🌍 Europe vs USA: Two Innovation Philosophies

The US embraces failure and fast iteration — risk is encouraged.
Europe tends to favor caution, employment preservation, and regulatory stability.
But innovation sometimes means letting go — even closing a business if needed.

🚀 Key Takeaways

Velocity: Tools like ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini are moving fast.
Acceleration: We are living the “law of accelerating returns.”
AI Landscape: The French Vilani report from 2018 was once just used to block a door…
In software development: visibility matters. Inaction costs you insight, momentum, and relevance.

Personal note: This was a deeply energizing talk — I left the amphitheater with a clear thought: Let’s innovate!

🛠️ Martin Kouba – Building Efficient MCP Servers

This session gave us a practical dive into building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers — and how surprisingly easy it can be.

🧩 What is MCP?

An open protocol (MIT license) for integrating LLMs with tools and external resources
Bidirectional communication via JSON-RPC 2.0
Transports include stdio, HTTP, and (deprecated) HTTP/SSE

MCP provides:

Server features: Tools, prompts, resources
Client features: Sampling, roots

⚠️ Missing Pieces in the Ecosystem

There’s a spec, but no official foundation supports it yet.
Anthropic maintains the GitHub org, but there’s:
- No PR review process
- No OSS governance
- No shared API standard
- No TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit) to validate implementations

🎯 Quarkus MCP Module – Goals

Provide a unified API to implement server-side MCP features
Expose programmatic access with @Inject

⚙️ Demo with Goose & Gemini

Martin demonstrated how to integrate an MCP server using Goose, a CLI/chat app, connected to Google’s Gemini LLM. The app was reactive, showcasing the real-time nature of:

Tool usage
Prompt chaining
Progress API — for managing long-running tools or resource operations

This session made it clear: while the protocol is still young and lacks formal governance, MCP is promising for building robust AI-enabled tools and agents.

🌞 Conclusion – Day 2

This second day was full of energy and meaningful discussions — not only during the talks, but also in the lively exchanges between sessions. That’s part of the true magic of attending RivieraDev.

Let’s not forget the delicious food and local specialties from the South of France: socca, pain bagnat, artisanal ice cream, and of course, the ever-present sunshine!

A fantastic end to an inspiring conference packed with brilliant keynotes, thought-provoking talks, and genuine community spirit. Already looking forward to the next edition!