Meetup Programmers Day 2025
Programmers Day, also known as the Day of the Programmer and occasionally as Day 2^8, is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th day of each year. This is September 13 in common years and September 12 in leap years. (Source: Wikipedia)
About two months ago, Mervyn reached out to me saying that he had an event in mind, which he would like to discuss. He wanted to plan and organize a Programmers Day which would bring together all user groups of Mauritius under one roof and that each user group could showcase their activities. It often happens that we get query from people about what user groups are active in Mauritius. So, having this event that focused solely on the user group activities rather than the technologies they advocate for, sounded like a nice idea.
First things first, we needed a venue for the event and time was running short. I contacted the African Leadership College of Higher Education to see if they could provide the venue and they gladly accepted. Next was to find a date for the event. The International Programmers Day is usually celebrated on the 12th or 13th September (depending on leap years). This year, it was celebrated on the 13th of September. However, that also meant it was the second Saturday of the month, when the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community holds its monthly meetup. Then, a week later, i.e on the 20th of September, the Front-end Coders held their monthly meetup. Therefore, to avoid a clash of events on those dates, Mervyn agreed that we hold the Programmers Day on the last Saturday of September, i.e the 27th.
Mervyn created a WhatsApp group with people from the different user groups wishing to help. Soon after, many started pushing ideas, like Alex working on the event poster, Shelly drafting the agenda and Mervyn looking for a catering sponsor.
Finally, on the 27th of September, all user groups (except for the AWS User Group), came together at the African Leadership College of Higher Education, and they presented their user group activities, things they organised and achieved in the past, e.g participating in global events, and also sharing their plans for the future.
Alex Bissessur presented the Cloud Native Community Group – Mauritius, which is the local chapter of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. He spoke about the group's meetups, activities, and projects that some of the community members are working on, and mentioned the group's upcoming event — Hacktoberfest!
For more details about the CNCG Mauritius – Hacktoberfest, ping Alex or join the CNCG Mauritius Telegram group.
I spoke at 2 p.m. on the openSUSE Project. I briefly covered the history of S.u.S.E since 1992 and the creation of openSUSE in 2005. I then explained that the openSUSE Project isn't a Linux distribution but a project that houses several distributions, like Leap, Leap Micro, Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Aeon and Kalpa, and also several other applications, like Open Build Service and OpenQA, just to name a few.
I spoke about the myriad ways that one can contribute to the project, with a special mention about the openSUSE mirrors that we've built in Mauritius.
openSUSE Mauritius is not a user group in the traditional sense. I explained that it is an umbrella of contributions to the upstream project by people from Mauritius.
The event ended around 3 p.m.