Welcoming Bill Easton to the FastMCP Team

FastMCP has quickly become the most popular framework for building MCP servers, and its momentum has been incredible to watch. To sustain that growth and continue pushing the ecosystem forward, I’m thrilled to announce the appointment of FastMCP’s first external maintainer: Bill Easton.

Bill is the Director of Product Management for Observability at Elastic, and folks active on the FastMCP repository will certainly recognize him by his GitHub handle, @strawgate. From the very beginning, he has been one of the most prolific and thoughtful contributors to the project.

Bill showed up months ago (long before MCP was cool) and immediately began insisting on the need for utilities to manipulate, transform, and compose MCP servers into more usable forms. He has consistently impressed me, not just with the care that goes into his work, but with how prescient he’s been in looking around corners to anticipate the use cases that are now considered obvious in the MCP ecosystem.

Many of Bill’s contributions are the type we prize most in the open-source world: critical internal optimizations and fixes that ensure your server just works, even if you’re not aware you’re using them. They’re the kind of thoughtful, careful improvements that make the difference between a demo and production-ready software.

Bill is also the driving force behind our entire suite of tool transformation features. These features are absolutely critical, especially for anyone generating MCP servers from large OpenAPI specs, and we expect them to become even more important as MCP servers get more complex.

Here’s the backstory: when we first launched OpenAPI conversion, it seemed like magic. Feed in your REST API spec, get out an MCP server. But the reality was messier. Those auto-generated servers were often so unusable that I wrote a whole blog post urging people to stop using the feature. The servers worked technically, but they were poisoning agents with hundreds of atomic, context-free operations.

Bill saw this problem differently. Instead of abandoning OpenAPI conversion, he built a sophisticated transformation layer that lets you reshape, combine, and filter tools intelligently. His contributions turned what was an anti-pattern into a powerful, production-ready workflow. Today, some of the most sophisticated FastMCP deployments rely on these transformation features to create agent-friendly interfaces from complex REST APIs.

What excites me most is what this represents for the project’s future. Bill’s appointment reflects a commitment to building a sustainable, community-driven project that can outlive any single contributor. The best open-source projects are those where leadership emerges naturally from the community, and Bill exemplifies exactly that kind of organic leadership.

As such, as part of formalizing Bill’s role, we’re also introducing a more structured way for the community to engage with the project’s development. Starting soon, we’ll host meetings every two weeks to discuss the project. These will operate in an alternating fashion:

• Committer’s Meeting (Bi-weekly): One session each month will be a closed meeting for maintainers to discuss and plan the project roadmap. To maintain transparency, notes and key decisions will be shared publicly.

• Community Office Hours (Bi-weekly): The alternating session will be an open meeting for the entire community. These will be office-hours-style, with a published agenda ahead of time. While we welcome discussion, these forums won’t be for debugging idiosyncratic issues that are better served by an asynchronous format like GitHub issues.

We’re currently planning the first office hours session and will share details with the community soon.

Happy engineering!