Hi, I'm Aaron. on Aaron Taylor

Building an MCP Server for Zotero

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:30:00 -0500

Zotero is my go-to tool for managing academic papers. It’s open-source with a fantastic ecosystem around it, and over time my library has grown into a useful personal knowledge base. When Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol late last year, I saw an opportunity in giving AI assistants direct access pull items from my Zotero library.

zotero-mcp is a small Python server that implements MCP for Zotero. The scope is intentionally narrow with just three tools: search your library, get an item’s metadata, and retrieve the full text of an item. The idea is that an assistant like Claude can chain these together naturally, searching for relevant papers and then pulling up the details it needs.

Building a Go template playground with Wasm

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 13:04:06 -0400

This post walks through how I created the Go Templates Playground. It pulls Go template rendering capabilities directly into your browser with WebAssembly (Wasm). I was motivated to this after recently seeing the utility of other similar environments out there for different programming languages¹. The Go template language has relatively wide adoption in projects like Helm and Hugo, which this tool can be used to prototype and experiment for. I’ve also been interested in incorporating Wasm into a deployed project, and this was a great opportunity for it, as well as chance to play with alternate approaches to help bring what are traditionally backend languages to the browser. It is built into my personal site to simplify development and deployment.

Adding search to a static site with Lunr and Preact

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 18:47:49 -0500

The website you are reading this on is made up of a set of static assets rendered with Hugo. This post walks through adding a basic search feature to this site that runs locally in your browser. I wanted to build out search in a way that aligned with the current statically generated approach, avoiding any server-side logic and executing queries entirely within the browser. Additionally, I wanted to keep the build process for the site simple, so avoiding the addition of any special steps in the local development or production build processes. This post walks through how I accomplished it for this site and how you could do the same.

Building a Neural Network in Go

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 22:16:40 -0500

This post covers the creation of a multi-layer neural network written in Go. We will walk through the basics of what neural networks are and how they work, specifically looking at some of the earliest types of feed-forward neural networks. We will then walk through the implementation of a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Our goal in this process is to create a network that performs well at recognizing handwritten digits on the MNIST dataset.

Improvements in Go 1.5

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 18:14:20 -0400

With the relatively recent release Go 1.5, there are a variety of interesting areas to look at in regards to what’s changed with the language. As one would expect based on both Go’s philosophy and it’s future compatibility guidelines, not much has changed from a language feature standpoint. Still, there a number of exciting under-the-hood enhancements in the latest release.

Package system

New functionality has been introduced to the packaging system in two ways. First, support for internal packages has been brought out of it’s experimental phase in Go 1.4 where it was being testing within GOROOT to now apply to packages within the GOPATH. This will allow Go packages to divide their different functions up into more logical components without exposing APIs in unwanted ways. This is a pattern that the App Engine SDK uses well, wrapping supporting functionality that is largely auto-generated in internal packages, making the logical code exposed through the API more readable and easier to maintain.

Linking Dynamic C++ Libraries with Go

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 22:23:41 -0400

These days, I spend a lot of time working with, designing, and implementing APIs. Since Meta is a microservices based application, the contracts that those APIs provide are crucial to designing the interactions with them. Quickly, maintaining good documentation and client libraries becomes nearly as important of a part of the applications as the code itself. Each step forward in functionality must provide solid footing to keep on building.

A spectacular tool that we have been using is Apiary, a service that provides API documentation through a super set of markdown that is fully parsable, providing mocked APIs and examples through a single set of documentation. The format of this markdown documentation is API Blueprint format, for which the documentation and a rich set of parsing libraries and tooling has been released under the MIT license.

A Website

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 01:04:26 -0400

My previous site was written completely from scratch. It gave me a valuable understanding of web fundamentals, but as my time grows short, I needed something with a little more tooling built in. Still, I wanted tools that I could understand. After working extensively with Go in my work at Meta, I felt I had a good enough understanding of its templating system to commit to using it as a the building blocks for my own website. Hugo seemed a great candidate to build my site off of, and it would be a great test run for what would eventually become the foundation of Meta’s “new” website, at least in the backend generation.

Electric Powered Off-Road Vehicle

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 23:12:19 -0400

Hand-fabricated a full-suspension metal frame from raw of steel tubing. Designed the electronics system for the power train, used CAD software to design the motor and control board mounts and drivetrain assembly and create custom fabricated parts.

Replicated hosting within a P2P marketplace

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 23:11:40 -0400

During the spring of my sophomore year at Williams College I took a project-based distributed systems course. Over the course of the semester in partner projects I worked on server from scratch written in C using a queue-based model to handle requests in a highly resilient manner, a multi-server e-commerce system with an iOS client communicating over XML-RPC, and set up a Hadoop cluster to analyze advertising data, correlating customers to impressions.

About

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 22:59:46 -0400

About me

I’ve been building things all my life

Today my work focuses on building AI software for tax professionals as VP of Engineering at Thomson Reuters, following the acquisition of Additive AI where I was co-founder and CTO.

Previously I was the architect for all Generative AI products within Salesforce Industries. I joined Salesforce in November 2019 via the acquisition of Diffeo, where I was co-founder leading our engineering team. Diffeo and the company I’d co-founded prior, Meta Search, were aimed at helping make sense of the world’s information. Throughout, I led our engineering teams in building machine learning and information retrieval systems to create user experiences that harness information from unstructured content.

Compiling Interpreter for x86 written in ARM

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 22:57:32 -0400

Created the fastest assembly language interpreter in my Computer Architecture class for large programs by compiling instructions read commands of the x86 instruction set into mapped sequences of ARM instructions which allowed loops to be executed much faster than if they had to be interpreted every time.

Go Templates Playground

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Live parser for Go template syntax, built on WebAssembly. See text/template and html/template for documentation.

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000