Backend Engineer Builds MCP Weather Server, Uncovers Two-Step API Quirk

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A backend engineer transitioning into AI engineering built and published a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects AI clients to AEMET, Spain's national weather agency API. The project aimed to complete a full build-to-publish cycle on npm and get listed in the official MCP registry, using AEMET as a low-risk sandbox. A key discovery was AEMET's two-step data retrieval pattern, where an initial API call returns a pointer URL rather than actual weather data, requiring a second request to fetch the real payload. Additional pitfalls included the API's HTTP status code conflicting with an internal 'estado' field in the JSON response, and content being encoded in ISO-8859-1 rather than UTF-8, causing character errors on naive parsing. The developer addressed these issues by isolating both API hops behind a single client function, making the tools agnostic to the underlying pattern.

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