Last month, on the 18, 19 and 20, the Developers Conference 2024 was held at the Caudan Arts Centre. This conference attracted 1,666 attendees over the three days. Topics ranged from web development, artificial intelligence, python programming, PHP, cybersecurity, project management, Cloud Native technologies and other topics of interest for tech enthusiasts.

The conference is an annual one, organised by the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community — founded by Jochen Kirstätter in 2013. The MSCC has, since then, evolved into a strong community of not just software craftsman, but also brought together sysadmins, engineers, designers, and other like-minded individuals. Over the years, my participation in the MSCC, especially regarding the annual Developers Conference has increased.

Today, I can say proudly, that I am one of the co-organisers of the Developers Conference and it has been a privilege to work with the organisers team, the squad and engage with all stakeholders — especially our sponsors and partners without whom this conference would not see the day. We had 23 sponsors that backed us up this year. We had 82 speakers and 77 sessions. Sessions were running simultaneously in five different tracks (compared to four tracks, last year). This year, we had a workshop track in a room dedicated for such sessions, where attendees could bring their laptop and follow along.

On the first day, the traditional opening ceremony started early at 9.30 a.m. Jochen and myself, we were the MC. We welcomed the attendees in the Caudan Arts Centre theatre in the first floor. People were still checking in at the registration booth (which was open a whole day, btw).

During the opening ceremony, we thanked all our sponsors and partners, attendees, speakers and the MSCC squad for contributing to make this conference happen. We started with some ground rules to follow while at the conference, like being courteous to each other, reminded everyone the Code of Conduct which is published on the conference website. We had a special slide on toilet etiquette — yes, it's needed. We thanked our sponsors for their trust and support. Then, we announced our first Diamond Sponsor, SUSE, who collaborated with us for the first time. We invited Dharam Juggath, Account Executive at SUSE to come on stage for the keynote address. Dharam briefed us about SUSE and the collaboration with the MSCC for DevCon 2024. After SUSE, we thanked our next Diamond Sponsor, Spoon Consulting, for their continued trust and support over the past years and for backing us once again in 2024. A huge shout-out to Sharon and Vimal and their team for collaborating with us. We then quickly went through the agenda and invited the attendees to plan their day accordingly.

We talked about Dodo Dodge, the game developed by Nicolas Mannoo, for DevCon 2024. Every year we have a theme for the conference, last year it was Space... and this year Pixel, thus a lot of retro gaming. In fact, it was fun to see that many of the sponsors adopted the theme fully, setting up their booth as per the theme or even running games and racing competitions at their booths to win prizes. We then announced that there were many prizes to win while at the conference. One could win a prize by just attending the conference and being eligible for the raffle, earn a swag by visiting a sponsor's booth or win other interesting prizes by attending sessions and participating in the Q&A.

After the opening ceremony, we had a break of about 15 mins, so people could move around, look at the agenda and head to the different rooms. As mentioned we had 5 simultaneous tracks this year and the rooms were named as follows:

Ground Floor:
Tetris
Street Fighter
Pac Man

First floor, take the stairs from the registration desk:
Space Invaders (the workshop room)

First floor, take the elevator:
Donkey Kong (theatre)

I learned a new thing this year, the difference between amphitheatre and theatre. So, from now on I'm calling the room by its proper definition: a theatre.

I remained in the theatre as I was moderating a panel discussion next. The topic of the panel was “Cloud Native Strategies for Mauritian Businesses”. My panelists had arrived by that time and we had a quick brief before getting on stage. The MSCC squad (I will talk about this awesome team a bit later on) helped me with setting up the chairs, organised a table for microphones, got water bottles for our panelists and kudos to Fawwaaz from the team to remain backstage, in case I’d need anything else during the panel.

My panelists:

Dawid van der Merwe, Solutions Architect, SUSE.
Dawid is a problem solver by heart. He has fulfilled that role in various vocations for nearly two decades. His background includes engineering, software testing, product management, architect, ethical hacking, and now Sales Engineer with SUSE. His passion to understand a problem holistically is only second to solving the problem. To solve a problem he incorporates the people, the processes, and the technology to ensure a holistic solution is implemented.

Dr. Viv Padayatchy, Managing Director, Cybernaptics Ltd.
Managing Director, Cybernaptics Ltd. Member of the Council of Elders of the African Regional Internet Registry, AFRINIC. Former Chairman of the National Cybersecurity Committee.

Delphine Bissessur, Head of Digital, (Local Bank)
Tech enthusiast who had the opportunity to work on ground breaking software in different industries from oil & gas to banking through medical research, she just wants to make the world a better place by providing innovative solutions to everyday problems.

Dhaneshwar Damry, Founder & CEO, Bhumishq, a Tier IV design data centre in Mauritius.

Avinash Meetoo, Director, Knowledge7.
Former Senior Adviser to the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation, Former Member of Board of Directors of the National Computer Board, Former Member of the Board of Governors of the University of Technology, Former Digital Advocate and Head of Experimentation Lab at UNDP Mauritius and Seychelles.

The panel discussion was very interesting with each panelist delving into the topic as we progressed. I started by asking Dr. Padayatchy about the time when Mauritian businesses had to move from physical to virtual, then virtual to public cloud. Then, the discussion when on about the resistance to change, organisation culture, etc. Dawid gave us an explanation or rather a pitch on what it means for an application to be cloud native. He shared anecdotes from a client that made the move to cloud native. Avinash spoke about the open source initiatives in Mauritius, both from a community perspective, him being one of the founders of the Linux User Group of Mauritius, and also as a former adviser to the Minister of Technology, Communication and Innovation. He gave us an insight on how policies are made and the kind of effort it requires to push things in the right direction. Dhaneshwar spoke at length about the missed opportunities in fintech and what we should do to catch up. He shared his experience running businesses and talked about the startup culture in Mauritius. Delphine gave us an insight on what it means to adopt cloud native technologies, how her team had to upskill but also look for expertise that could help with the more complex tasks.

After the panel, I spent some time at the sponsors booths talking to our partners.

In fact, it’s time that I mention about a special partnership at this year’s Developers Conference. There was a lot of awe from the presence of SUSE, "The Linux Vendor", at the conference. La Sentinelle Ltd, where I work, is now a SUSE partner. We held discussions with SUSE to come to the Developers Conference with of course, the idea of helping the local companies adopt Linux and assist them in migrating their critical business operations. Moreover, we plan to bring more local businesses to adopt cloud native technologies through Rancher in the coming months.

I have been contributing to openSUSE since 2009. I’ve spoken at openSUSE conferences in Germany and Indonesia. I’ve done openSUSE and Kubernetes presentations in Uganda. Since 2018, I am volunteering as an election official for openSUSE and this year I also joined the membership committee. All that being said, when La Sentinelle Ltd started the “La Sentinelle Innovative Technologies” unit, and required a strong open source partner, SUSE seemed like the natural evolution. I know openSUSE in and out, I have very good friends in the community, I understand the SUSE technology stack, I manage the openSUSE Linux mirror on the island, so, yes, once again, a SUSE partnership is a natural evolution.

SUSE has a robust portfolio of solutions. It powers anything from small embedded and IoT devices (to collect weather data) to the fastest supercomputer of the world. Being able to operate such an operating system is a matter of pride — so, if you are an openSUSE user or you operate a SUSE Linux Enterprise server at work, meet me at the next Cloud Native Meetup (which will be held at the SWAN Head Office in Port-Louis, on the 31st of August) ... and maybe you can go back home with a blue Gecko plushie.

At the SUSE booth, we had good engagement with local businesses and talked about their challenges. We also had quite some interests from university students. I had further discussions with some lecturers and we will probably soon have specific sessions at the universities for students to discover SUSE and Rancher in a proper lab environment.

Dawid doing his presentation on Business Critical Linux on Saturday, i.e day 3 of the conference.

Kudos to Alita, Magda, Dawid and Dharam from the SUSE South Africa team for having made this trip to Mauritius for the DevCon 2024. I hope that in the coming months the results of this trip will be very positive. For that, my dear friends, we’ll have to paint the servers green.

La Sentinelle Ltd had its booth next to SUSE, for very obvious reasons. It was easier for us to discuss our collaboration with SUSE. We also provided information about our two courses that we’re offering through La Sentinelle Training Centre:

• Linux System Administration
• Cloud Computing

For more information about the courses, please send an email to training@lasentinelle.mu and my colleagues will assist you.

I also had the chance to discuss about web development with people visiting our booth, more specifically on how we are using Laravel at La Sentinelle. For those who usually check local news on lexpress.mu — the website is built using Laravel. I discussed about some challenges that we had along the way and how we handled those. 

I was glad to answer some curious minds about our partnership with SUSE. I talked about Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2, Rancher Prime and the professional certifications.

Thank you to everyone who visited our booth, I hope you were able to grab a free copy of l’express newspaper (support journalism). Also, huge thanks to my colleagues from La Sentinelle for holding the fort over three days.

My day 1 at DevCon was mainly talking to people, visiting booths and heading to some sessions for a quick picture.

The second day was very important to Alex and myself. Despite the hectic first day, we had to stay energised the whole Friday because:

• "we" had a Kubernetes workshop (let me clarify though, I had a 5 mins part and Alex had 1.5 hrs part in that workshop)
• there was a SUSE Bootcamp on Enterprise Container Management
• I had a session, or rather a light talk (yes, next year I am going to call it so), on cloud native
• there was a session on Linux Mirror Updates (Jain & Dereck held the fort well)

MSCC Squad

The MSCC Squad is the muscle power that helps make the Developers Conference awesome. They are volunteers who work in different companies but at this time of the year they are fully engaged in running some important parts of the conference — one of them being the critical operation call "The Registration". A lot of things could go wrong at the registration. In fact, we learned and improved much from past events. You might have noticed that this year, despite the growing number of 1600+ attendees, registration was smooth.

We had QRs everywhere... to connect to the Internet, to register for attending the conference and then to check-in at the registration desk. 😎 Kudos to the Squad for all the pre-conference brainstorming. Next year, we can make things even better. 🤗

DevCon Organisers’ Team

The Developers Conference organisers’ team welcomed a new member this year — Vidush Namah. The role of the organisers is diverse, depending on each member but we mainly handle logistics, organise the venue, liaise with sponsors and partners, and most importantly make sure that the conference runs smoothly.

Internet Connectivity

One of my roles as co-organiser is to ensure we have internet connectivity over the three days. This year, it was a pleasure to collaborate with the Kaldera team. We obtained more bandwidth than we required, the technical team (Sébastien and his men) did an awesome job with the fiber setup — a sleek installation. I was astounded learning that they even brought a network cabinet and had a backup plan in case the fiber connection would fail. The Kaldera team had a booth at the conference, they were engaged, the technical team came from time to time, enquired about any issues (we had none), I received Internet consumption graphs daily, Laurent (let’s call him the project manager for Internet at DevCon) called me daily to enquire if everything was to our satisfaction — Benita, Ranveer, Priyanta (sorry if I missed other names), thank you for collaborating with us for DevCon 2024.

Cloud Native Chapter of Mauritius

In or around 2019, while we experimenting with openSUSE Kubic at La Sentinelle, Chittesh and I discussed about starting a Kubernetes UG in Mauritius. However, me spending much of my time around openSUSE, Chittesh took the responsibility of getting in touch with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We had plans to really kick-start the Kubernetes UG at the Developers Conference 2020. Chittesh even managed to obtain a bunch of really nice goodies from CNCF. But alas, we all remember how 2020 turned out to be. Later on, the momentum was lost... but not completely lost! Let's fast-forward to 2024. Alex and Delphine attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in March this year. When Alex came back he mentioned to me about starting a Cloud Native Chapter for Mauritius. I told him about our failed (but humble) attempt back in 2019. Anyway, we decided that this time, let's seriously put all the effort needed and get it done. The chapter registration had some pre-requisites which both Alex and myself fulfilled. We made the application and in about three weeks' time the chapter was approved. So, at the very beginning the Chapter consisted of Alex, Delphine and myself as the "founding" members. 😊 A small feat but nonetheless we're proud of it. At DevCon 2024, we had our first official Cloud Native Mauritius sessions.

Themed Booths

As I mentioned, several of our sponsors had themed booths. They deserve the praise for the design effort put into the planning.

Jochen captured this shot of a group of students posing at the SUSE booth with Dharam.

Networking Hour

The Networking Hour at Pink Socks, Le Suffren Hotel & Marina, was sponsored by Spoon Consulting. Ali Ghanty captured some really nice shorts. I'm sharing a few here to give you an idea about the mood & atmosphere.