{"slug": "i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award", "title": "I received the AAIF Outstanding Technical Contribution Award", "summary": "The Agentic AI Foundation presented its Outstanding Technical Contribution Award to an MCP Python SDK maintainer at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America on the second day of the event, recognizing work that included shipping the SDK's v2 beta alongside the 2026-07-28 revision of the MCP specification. The v2 release, now the stable line, adds a new MCPServer API, multi-round-trip requests, standard error codes, authorization hardening, routable transport headers, a deprecation policy and OpenTelemetry tracing enabled by default; the maintainer also sponsored SEP-1288, the WebSocket transport. The maintainer credited colleague Laís Carvalho for the nomination and employer Pydantic for funding the open-source work, and noted that Vstorm's Antoni Kozelski and Bartosz Gonczarek received the Open Agentic AI Innovation Award at the same event.", "body_md": "Last Friday, on day two of [AGNTCon + MCPCon North America](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-north-america/),\nthe [Agentic AI Foundation](https://aaif.io) gave me the **Outstanding Technical Contribution Award** for my work on the\n[MCP Python SDK](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk).\n\nYou can watch the moment on the day two livestream, right after the opening keynote.\n\n## \n\nI'm one of the two maintainers of the MCP Python SDK. Python developers use it to build MCP servers and clients, and it's where a lot of my time has gone this year.\n\nThe biggest piece of that work was v2. We shipped the [v2 beta](https://pydantic.dev/articles/mcp-python-sdk-v2-beta) alongside the\n2026-07-28 revision of the MCP specification, with a new `MCPServer` API and multi-round-trip requests. v2 is now the\nstable release line.\n\nA lot of v2 is the new specification, implemented in Python: standard error codes, authorization hardening, routable transport headers, a deprecation policy, and OpenTelemetry tracing on by default.\n\nOn the specification side, I sponsored [SEP-1288](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/1288),\nthe WebSocket transport. The HTTP transport also runs on [Starlette](https://github.com/Kludex/starlette) and\n[Uvicorn](https://github.com/Kludex/uvicorn), which I maintain, so when the SDK finds a bug underneath it, I can fix it\nin the layer where it belongs.\n\nMost of that work happens in issues, pull requests, and spec discussions that nobody sees on a conference stage. It's nice to have it noticed.\n\n## \n\nFirst, a special thank you to my colleague [Laís Carvalho](https://pydantic.dev/authors/lais-carvalho). She nominated me, and I would not\nhave been on that stage without her.\n\nTo the MCP maintainers and contributors: the SDK is better because of every issue, review, and pull request you sent.\n\nTo [Pydantic](https://pydantic.dev): you pay me to work on open source, and you let me spend that time where the\ncommunity needs it. That is rarer than it should be.\n\nIt also goes both ways. I work on [Pydantic Logfire](https://pydantic.dev/logfire) too, so v2 ships an OpenTelemetry\nmiddleware enabled by default. Call `logfire.configure(distributed_tracing=True)` in your MCP server and\n`logfire.configure()` in your client, and every request between them arrives in [Logfire](https://pydantic.dev/logfire) as one trace. The [v2 beta post](https://pydantic.dev/articles/mcp-python-sdk-v2-beta) walks through it.\n\nI also shared the stage with our friends Antoni Kozelski and Bartosz Gonczarek from\n[Vstorm](https://vstorm.co/?utm_source=pydantic&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award), who won the **Open Agentic\nAI Innovation Award**. Congratulations to both of you, and thank you for making the photo a lot better.\n\nThe [Logfire MCP server](https://pydantic.dev/docs/logfire/guides/mcp-server/) is where this work lands first. It runs on\nthe same Python SDK, so the standard error codes, the authorization hardening, and the tracing middleware above all show\nup there before anywhere else. I want it to be the best MCP server you connect your coding agent to, and I spend a lot of\nmy week making that true. If you have a Logfire project, add `https://logfire-us.pydantic.dev/mcp` (or the EU URL) to\nyour agent and ask it what broke in production last night. Setup takes a few minutes, and the answer usually takes less.\n\nSee you at the next MCPCon.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award", "canonical_source": "https://pydantic.dev/articles/aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award", "published_at": "2026-10-27 09:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-27 18:44:27.081314+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "agent-protocols", "developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Agentic AI Foundation", "MCP Python SDK", "Model Context Protocol", "Pydantic", "Pydantic Logfire", "Laís Carvalho", "Vstorm", "AGNTCon + MCPCon North America"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-received-the-aaif-outstanding-technical-contribution-award.jsonld"}}