Among the many sessions and daily keynotes, I had the opportunity to host and moderate a panel discussion titled “How Much Cybersecurity is Enough?”, a timely topic given the rapidly evolving threat landscape and the growing role of AI, cloud, and regulatory frameworks in shaping security strategies. With a diverse panel of industry experts and a highly engaged audience, the session turned into a dynamic exchange of ideas, experiences, and practical insights.

I totally enjoyed hosting and sincerely hope that everyone who attended the session enjoyed as much.

The panelists were:

• Didier Samfat, PhD
  Cybersecurity Specialist | CISSP | CEH | CMNA
• Zeimm Auladin-Suhootoorah
  IT Manager at Gamma Civic Ltd
• Joe Van der Walt
  Founding Director at Kohde
• Sebastien Stormacq
  Principal Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services

Dr Samfat emphasized the need to foster a strong culture of security awareness within organizations, supported by regular maturity assessments to uncover potential blind spots. Building on this, Zeimm provided practical, real-world perspectives on securing complex infrastructure while striking the right balance between innovation and budget constraints.

Joe highlighted the developer’s critical role in embedding security from the outset and the growing responsibility of AI builders to protect user data and privacy.

Adding a broader lens, Sébastien explored cloud-native security, the shared responsibility model, and the impact of evolving regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and the Cyber Resilience Act.

The room was filled to capacity, with an engaged and enthusiastic audience that actively participated by asking questions throughout the discussion. It's a shift from previous years’ format, as I invited audience interaction during the session rather than reserving all questions for a Q&A at the end.

Didier Adrien, IT Manager at SWAN, while commenting about security incidents in Mauritius, highlighted the importance of openly disclosing security incidents, stressing how such transparency benefits the broader community by fostering awareness, encouraging collaboration, and enabling collective learning to prevent similar threats.

My First Conference as a Board Member

Earlier this year, I was elected to the openSUSE Board, making this year's conference a little different, with added responsibilities.

Two days before the conference began, the Board held our face-to-face meetings. We voted on a few pending items and prepared for the Board's public session with the community, which was scheduled for Friday, 27 June at 6 p.m. These pre-conference meetings were insightful, especially for me as a new Board Member. I learned a great deal from more seasoned members like Simon Lees, Shawn Dunn, and our Chair Gerlald Pfeifer. I also benefitted from the perspectives of former Board Members Douglas DeMaio and Patrick Fitzgerald, who also joined the sessions. Although Jeff Mahoney and I started our mandates at the same time, his experience and understanding of how SUSE and openSUSE intersect brought invaluable context to many of the discussions.

Swag at the conference

One of my proposals as a Board Member was to set up an openSUSE Shop at the conference venue. This initiative allowed attendees, especially those visiting from outside Europe, to purchase openSUSE swag such as t-shirts, caps, tote bags, and mugs. For many of us from regions like Africa or islands like Mauritius, international shipping fees often exceed the actual item costs. This shop helped address that.

Thankfully, Eddy and Alex volunteered to help run the shop, so we didn't need to recruit more volunteers. However, managing the swag table while attending sessions was no easy feat. We had to take turns so we could still attend the talks we were interested in and present our own sessions (Alex and I each had two talks spread across different days).

Day 1 — Keynotes, Community Energy and Technical Deep Dives

The conference opened with a keynote address by SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen. He spoke from the heart, about his roots as an engineer, his passion for coding, and his belief in the power of community. He reminded us of how openSUSE reached its 20-year milestone, highlighting major contributions like YaST, KDE integration, and the Open Build Service (OBS), the latter being adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for running Kubernetes builds.

Proprietary software development does not get you anywhere, it has to be open.
— Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen

That statement received a resounding applause.

Next up was Rick Spencer, SUSE General Manager, who emphasized that openSUSE is not just a collection of distros, but a single project with a unified purpose. He encouraged contributors to see beyond labels like Tumbleweed or Leap, and instead, embrace a collaborative spirit. His closing call-to-action was simple but powerful:

Join the momentum, every contribution matters.
— Rick Spencer

Later that day, I also attended Cathy Hu's talk on "SELinux — current state in (open)SUSE" while keeping an eye on the shop. As the maintainer of openSUSE's SELinux policy and userspace toolchain, Cathy gave a thorough overview of security improvements in the distro.

The second keynote was delivered by Peer Heinlein, CEO of the Heinlein Group. He talked about the risks of relying on proprietary software, referencing the fate of ownCloud after its acquisition by Kiteworks. In response, the Heinlein Group forked the open-source ownCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS) codebase to launch OpenCloud.

Midway through his talk, I had a déjà vu moment as his name sounded familiar. That's when I remembered that Peer Heinlein is the author of the book Dovecot: POP3/IMAP Servers for Enterprises and ISPs, a crucial reference when I built the email infrastructure for La Sentinelle five years ago.

After his talk, I introduced myself, shared how his book helped me, and thanked him in person. I took a selfie with him and Richard brown, the former openSUSE Board Chair who has always pushed me to be more involved in the project.

I attended the session on Leap 16.0 Beta, by Luboš Kocman, during which he unveiled the new Leap wallpaper.

We were very happy to see the green lizard on the wallpaper, a photo taken by our dear friend and fellow Mauritian, Arwin Neil Baichoo and submitted for the Leap 16.0 and Tumbleweed wallpaper collection. He made us proud. 😊

Day 2 — Talks on Community, Infrastructure, and the African Context

I delivered my first talk in the "Gallerie" room titled "2 cents on improving openSUSE Membership (Management)".

I presented my thoughts on how we could improve the membership process through a custom Laravel-based platform. I had a productive follow-up discussion afterward.

Later, Alex gave his talk on "Geographically Distributed Kubernetes Clusters", highlighting the challenges cloud enthusiasts face in Mauritius, where GCP, AWS, and Azure are absent.

He described how unreliable power and lack of local cloud services inspired him and his friends to build a distributed Kubernetes cluster to host their own blogs and applications.

My second talk, "Building openSUSE Mirror(s) in Mauritius", took place at 4 p.m. in the main hall. It was a status update on the mirror infrastructure project I began in 2022.

I shared lessons learned, improvements to sync strategies, and announced that Kaldera is sponsoring a second mirror in Mauritius, soon to be the fourth mirror in Africa.

The day concluded with the openSUSE Board Q&A session at 6 p.m. Gerald opened with a summary of proposed updates to election and membership rules, and I expanded on our membership platform. Jeff, Simon, and Shawn addressed governance structure proposals. The session felt productive, open, and reflective of the community's spirit.

Day 3 — Bring openSUSE swag for folks back home

On the final day, Alex gave his second talk, "Production-Ready Virtualisation with Harvester and Longhorn." He addressed how recent changes in pricing/licensing by a major virtualization vendor created uncertainty, especially in Africa. Thus, prompting many to seek alternatives.

Harvester and Longhorn, being open-source, hyperconverged solutions, offer a practical alternative at a time when cloud-native infrastructure is becoming the default.

At the end of day, as we were wrapping up, Doug said that we had a few conference t-shirts left and if I would like to bring back home some of them. Naturally, I agreed as I know friends back home would love that.

In fact, I distributed the t-shirts during my talk about the openSUSE Project at the Developers Conference 2025 (Mauritius), which happened just a few weeks after the openSUSE Conference.

Wrapping Up

This year's conference was memorable for many reasons, my new role on the Board, the warm community spirit, the brilliant talks, and of course, the friendships and collaborations that deepened along the way. Videos from all the sessions at oSC25 are available on YouTube.

A big thanks to everyone who made the openSUSE Conference 2025 a success.

Looking forward to seeing you all again in 2026!

After many years, I participated in an event organised in collaboration with the University of Mauritius. Ten years ago, around this time of the year the Linux User Group of Mauritius and the UoM Computer Club (2013) organised a Linux Festival at the Paul Octave Wiehe Auditorium. Last Saturday's Google Developers Festival (DevFest) 2023, being held on the campus of the University of Mauritius, brought back memories of those days. It also reminded me that it's been a decade since I am actively contributing to the tech community. 🎊🤓

Some happy tears flow down the cheek. Sniff!

Okay, let's talk about DevFest 2023. DevFest is an annual tech conference organised globally by the Google Developer Groups (GDG) community. This year marked the 5th edition of DevFest Mauritius. It was hosted by GDG Mauritius and the University of Mauritius (UoM). The Google Student Developer Clubs of UoM, University of Technology, Polytechnics Mauritius and the African Leadership College helped in spreading the word.

Registration for the event was done through the GDG Mauritius chapter page on the Google Developer Groups Bevy platform, while information about the event, the agenda and the speakers was also available at devfest.mscc.mu.

We had 20 speakers from different tech backgrounds — web development, mobile application development and systems/cloud engineering.

My presentation was scheduled at 11:30 a.m. in the G2 room of the Faculty of Law & Management. I started the presentation sharp on time to be able to stay both on track and on time, as for the next 45 mins, I had planned a whole journey of writing code to deploying the same on a cluster of servers.

PHP is still relevant in 2023. It still powers a lot of websites on the Internet. Even Facebook started on PHP and later created the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) to compile PHP source code to HipHop bytecode for faster execution and then they created the Hack programming language.

I started the presentation by talking about PHP.

If you are just starting with PHP development, I suggest that you closely follow the works of a PHP framework, like Laravel or Symfony. I use Laravel a lot — in fact most of my web related work is now on Laravel. During the presentation I mentioned how lexpress.mu moved from Drupal to Laravel.

My next slide had a few commands needed to create a Laravel project and to run it locally (assuming that PHP and composer are already installed on that machine).

Now, that we had a codebase and we made our desired modifications to the Laravel code, it was time that we thought about packaging it and shipping it to the cloud. The easy way — containers!

SUSE Base Container Image (SUSE BCI) enters the scene. We can of course find plenty of PHP based containers to ship the code, then why SUSE BCI? The short anwser is compliance. Very often if you are working for a big company, there are rules to use software that have enterprise support. SUSE BCIs are enterprise-ready container images based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). One can purchase a support subscription for the container or inherit an existing subscription from a host SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

I talked about the Base Images and the Language Container Images. For our need to ship the Laravel codebase, we looked at the three SUSE BCIs that support PHP.

The ideal candidate was the SUSE BCI PHP-Apache 8 image. Our Laravel code is actually this year's DevFest Mauritius website. We do not require a database. The conference schedule and speakers details are pulled from a Sessionize.com API and kept as JSON locally. Therefore, a single container to run the PHP code and serve the HTTP content would be fine.

I spoke about the three SUSE BCIs for PHP and possible use cases on different types of PHP scripts or applications we may run.

Okay, it's good that we have a container to run PHP code but it's not great, yet — because it cannot run "our" PHP code. Laravel 10 requires PHP version 8.2 to run whereas the SUSE BCI has PHP version 8.0.30 as latest version.

Most Enterprise Linux distributions support packages for as long as security fixes remain available for the package. That is the case with SLES and PHP 8 here. The latest version of PHP available from the official SLE_BCI repo is PHP version 8.0.30 which will continue to receive security fixes until the end of November this year, then the package will be upgraded to version 8.1.x which will receive security fixes until November 2024.

Then, how can we use the SUSE Linux Enterprise container but with PHP version 8.2?

Comes into the scene, SUSE's own Open Build Service.

I explained how Open Build Service (OBS) allows one to compile software and package the latter for different Linux distributions and different CPU architectures. Then, I mentioned build.opensuse.org where SUSE upstream projects reside. Recently, the Linux Foundation decided to build Kubernetes packages using OBS too. I talked about how openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise share a 1:1 binary compatible codebase.

One could build PHP v8.2.12 packages using build.opensuse.org but... there is actually no need — because v8.2.12 is already built for SLE 15 SP5. 😎 We can simply add the OBS repo to our SLE BCI Apache-PHP container and install the latest version of PHP.

Huh! So, by this time we have a codebase, we have chosen a BCI and we know how to get the latest version of PHP running which is required for our application (i.e the website of DevFest Mauritius 2023). What's next? We need to build a container image that will hold our codebase and be ready for shipping.

So... Let's build it!

Before talking about building containers though, I mentioned that I don't like the idea of simply copying Dockerfiles from the Internet and start using. Writing a Dockerfile is not difficult and a lot of times it requires just a few lines. It also helps us keep things clean and we know what we are doing.

Let's write a Dockerfile then.

During the presentation, I explained what each line does. Especially, why I chained the RUN commands in one line instead of multiple RUN commands. Each RUN command creates an OverlayFS layer and takes up a little more space. In this example, it would have taken an additional 8MB if we had used multiple RUN commands for every CLI command specified.

FROM registry.suse.com/bci/php-apache:8

In the first line, we pull the SUSE BCI PHP-Apache 8 image. Then, we copy our project directory inside the container image at a specific path which we have specified in an Apache configuration. I talked briefly about Apache VirtualHosts.

COPY ./devfest2023 /srv/www/vhosts/devfest2023
COPY ./devfest2023.conf /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/devfest2023.conf

Next, we copy a "repo" configuration file that contains information about the OBS repository.

COPY ./obs_php.repo /etc/zypp/repos.d

The content of the .repo file is available from the PHP package project on build.opensuse.org.

We run the zypper ref command to update the repo database. We update the packages with the --allow-vendor-change option. Without this option, it will not upgrade PHP because the currently installed PHP package by vendor SUSE is the highest version available. By allowing vendor change, the package will be upgraded using newer packages from the OBS repository.

RUN zypper ref; zypper up -y --allow-vendor-change; \
zypper in -y php8-tokenizer php8-iconv php8-intl php8-bcmath \
php8-bz2 php8-ctype php8-gd php8-posix php8-readline

We install a few other PHP libraries that will be required by our Laravel application.

Laravel writes to a log file stored at the storage/laravel.log path. Therefore, ownership of the directory is changed to the user wwwrun which is the user that owns the Apache child processes.

chown -R wwwrun:wwwrun /srv/www/vhosts/devfest2023; \

We enable the mod_rewrite module in Apache because we have a Rewrite Rule in our Apache configuration that forwards all requests to the index.php file.

a2enmod rewrite

Lastly, we make the container reachable on port 80.

EXPOSE 80

Our Dockerfile is ready. We can build the container image.

I explained what each of the options does in the docker build command. After building the image, we can run a container locally to test the application.

docker run —-rm -p 8080:80 devfest:2023

Once again, I explained what each of the option in the above command does.

So, we've built a container image successfully, we've tested our application running inside a container, what do we do next? Deploy to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)? Not, yet. We need to push this container image to a registry, from which GKE will be able to pull and deploy.

Hereon, we started talking about the Google Cloud Platform. We needed to enable two services on GCP before we can ship a container and deploy our application. The services are:

• Artifact Registry API
• Kubernetes Engine API

I explained that previously we would use the Container Registry API but that was only limited to Docker container images. The Artifact Registry can hold repos for container images, npm packages, python, etc.

We created a repository in the Artifact Registry, we specified the format as Docker and we selected a region. We discussed about this choice (i.e region) for a while. My usual trick for obtaining the best latency to a "region" is to understand how our submarine fiber cables connect us to the rest of the world. Since, the SAFE/SAT-3/WASC submarine cable connects us to the west side of the European continent, for this example we chose the europe-west1 region, which is in Belgium. Not too far from the landing point in Portugal? 🤔 Anyway, let's continue...

After creating the repository, the GCP console redirects to the repository details page. I encircled the path which we need when pushing the container image to the registry.

Oh... wait. Before pushing our container image to the Google Artifact Registry we need to setup authentication for Docker. Read the instructions here. During the presentation I did not elaborate on the Docker/GCP authentication part as it is purely textbook instruction.

We're almost there. We have built our container, we have set up our repository on Google Cloud, so now let's do the next step.

We tag the local image devfest:2023 (which we built earlier) using the path we saw on the repository page. I explained each item in the command for clarity.

Then, we run:

docker push europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/devfest2023-403313/mscc/devfest:2023

You can see the progress as each layer is being copied to the registry. When completed, refresh the registry page on the cloud console.

Hereon, we started talking about Kubernetes and its complexity. However, Google (and other cloud providers) offer a Managed Kubernetes Service. Managed meaning — the implementation and related complexities are obsfuscated. Thus, as a developer you should be able to deploy your application in a cluster with minimal effort. That's exactly what Google Kubernetes Engine is about.

You click on the three dots and select "Deploy to GKE".

The first option is to select a container, but here the devfest:2023 container is pre-selected. You can add environment variables which you usually do through the .env file of a Laravel application. Since, we are not using a database or require any other specific info to pass on, we can skip this part.

GKE creates a deployment configuration which defines the state of the cluster. It uses defaults here, e.g the replicas (i.e no. of nodes in the cluster) to 3. All of this information can viewed in the YAML file which is accessible from the page.

The YAML file is read-only at this point. We cannot edit the deployment configuration but we can do so once the cluster is created. Then, we can edit the YAML config to adjust it to our needs or use other "buttons" in the console to scale the cluster up/down, horizontally or vertically.

After the configuration part, the last step is to select whether we want to create a service to expose the cluster. Since, we want our application to be available on the Internet, we expose the cluster on port 80.

After we hit "DEPLOY", GKE starts building the cluster.

For this example, the cluster was ready in less than 5 mins.

Once the cluster is ready, the deployment details page will display information regarding the availability and health of the cluster nodes. At the bottom of the page, the endpoint in the Expose services show the Public IP Address for the deployment. Click on that and you can access your application. In our case, we were able to see the DevFest Mauritius 2023 site hosted on the IP address.

That was my share of contribution to DevFest Mauritius 2023, as speaker this year. I hope everybody who attended the session enjoyed it and learned at least a thing or two. 😊

The day started similar to DevCon 2022 days... waking up at 04h00 and hitting the road by 06h30. Shelly & I picked up Pritvi, Girish and Vidush along the way. We reached the ALC campus by 08h00. As we arrived at the campus' security checkpoint, Shelly got down from the car and explained the security personnel about the event and handed her the list of attendees. This was a security requirement by ALC — they needed the names of all attendees in order to allow them to access the college premise. Totally understandable, it's a college and they have rules.

As we moved to the parking area I noticed JoKi's Mitsubishi SUV. Seconds later I saw JoKi walk by and we waved. Mary Jane was already at the cafeteria's entrance where the registration desk was meant to be. In fact, they had started setting up that area — with the tables and roll-up banners. The DevFest 2022 backdrop was yet to be set up. Pritvi gave a helping hand with that.

The opening ceremony was held in the cafeteria. Few minutes before it started, JoKi checked the sound equipment and tested his laptop display on the TV. Meanwhile, registration was in full swing.

Registration was faster and smoother with the QR verification. Once checked-in, attendees received their DevFest attendee badge, a t-shirt, stickers and a 50% discount voucher by cloud.mu.

Attendees spread around the campus checking the presentation rooms, sponsors area, meeting people, etc.

At 09h00, everyone came to the cafeteria for the opening ceremony. DevFest 2022 kicked-off! JoKi welcomed everyone and explained about the Google Developer Groups around the world and what is DevFest. He invited Yovin Poorun, Computing Degree Program Lead at the African Leadership College, to address a few words.

Yovin's support and assistance in making the DevFest 2022 happen at the African Leadership College was greatly appreciated.

Then, Didier Béphage, Technology Director at SD Worx addressed a few words. SD Worx was one of the sponsors of DevFest 2022 and they have continuously supported local dev activities in Mauritius.

Didier spoke about SD Worx and the company's culture. He went through some details as JoKi displayed the company's website on the TV.

The first presentations in Rooms 1 and 2 were started at 10h00.

My talk was scheduled at 11h00 in Room 1. I reached there a few mins before, as Dhanesh was concluding his presentation on CI/CD in Google Cloud. My talk was about deploying a Laravel application on the Google Kubernetes Engine.

I started with explaining about Laravel. It is an open-source project, it has great documentation, it follows the MVC principle, it has several first-party packages and deployment is a piece of cake (like most PHP applications).

I spoke about the Laravel ecosystem, tools such as Forge and Vapor, starter-kits like Breeze and Jetstream — how they all make development less of a struggle.

I touched on the Model-View-Controller subject and explained how the data, the design and the logic are kept separate, giving the developer better control over the code.

Then, I mentioned Laravel Bootcamp, for anyone wishing to start Laravel development. Bootcamp is ideal for somebody who is just starting a career in webdev to get an idea on how full-stack development is possible with Laravel. One may choose to write all the backend logic in PHP and design fancy pages using either Blade templates, Vue.js or React.

A Laravel project can be created with just a few commands. Adding Breeze to that, we can have an authentication feature built into the app instantly.

Say we have a working Laravel project... how do we deploy that on Kubernetes. Not just, yet. We need to break down the application components such that the code can run on as many instances while the application data resides on a centralised location which every instance can access.

Thus, we can move the database to Google Cloud SQL and the file storage to Google Cloud Storage. We are then left with just the application code and some binaries required to run the application — which can now be multiplied on as many virtual machines as we need or deploy them in containers in a Kubernetes cluster.

I spoke about the advantages of using a managed Kubernetes platform such as the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Kubernetes is being actively developed. A one-man army cannot simply develop applications and manage Kubernetes clusters on his own. GKE provides plenty of options for a DevOps to configure how the cluster must run, scale and be cost effective.

GKE provides two types of clusters — standard and autopilot. In the former, you can choose the number of nodes you want in the cluster and provision those nodes according to your needs. You are billed a management fee and also billed for every running node (a Google Compute instance) irrespective of whether there are any workloads running on the node or not.

However, in the autopilot mode, GKE decides what is best. Thus, upon creation there are no running nodes at all in the cluster. Nodes are provisioned when workloads are deployed. You cannot add/remove nodes in the autopilot cluster. Those are done automatically by GKE when the workloads require additional resources or nodes can be scaled down if no more required.

The autopilot cluster is more cost effective because they are not billed per node (i.e per Compute instance) but instead they are billed per pods (calculated as per the amount of resources required by the pods).

During the demo part of the presentation, I created two clusters, one standard and the other as autopilot. I showed that the cost using the default settings in a standard cluster would result in a monthly bill of above $300 even if nothing is deployed. In the autopilot mode, a flat fee of $0.10/hour is applied which results in a $72/month flat amount and each pod is billed individually for the vCPU, memory and ephemeral storage used.

I also explained how pricing changes across different regions while explaining the difference between regions and zones.

Coming back on the discussion on containers, I showed how I containerised a Laravel application and mentioned a peculiar issue that I encountered on my Apple M1 Macbook. The M1 processor is ARM64 and thus the container is built for ARM64. Pushing that container to the Google Artifacts Registry and then deploying it on GKE throws an "exec format error".

It took me a while to realise my mistake — being a relatively new "M1 user".

I should have built the container for the linux/amd64 architecture before pushing it to the Google Artifacts Registry.

JoKi from the audience commented whether the --platform flag couldn't have been specified in the Dockerfile. Yes, that could be done too.

However, in my case, I was building and testing the container on ARM64. Then, for deployment on GKE, I would build the container for linux/amd64 and push it to the Google Artifacts Registry. Therefore, it was easier to specify the architecture at build time instead of hardcoding it in the file.

Lastly, I talked about the gcloud and kubectl CLI tools which I used to interact with the cluster. Using kubectl I obtained information about the pods and I could also investigate the pods individually.

Neil asked whether one could choose the container engine to use by GKE. I answered that GKE would most probably use the CRI-O engine rather than docker-runc. During my experiments I did not find whether GKE could be configured to use a different container engine or a different architecture like ARM64.

That's it! I was able to cram everything in 45 mins.

After my session, I went back to the cafeteria for lunch. Luckily, there was vegetarian food. 🫑🍅🥬

Next, I attended Pritvi's session about improving your exposure as a local guide on Google Maps using Google Lens. I am glad I attended the session. It was very helpful to understand how Google Maps behaves as a social network for "local guides". There is a point system and local guides gain more points for correcting and improving the accuracy of Google Maps — e.g adding a missing place, uploading pictures of a restaurant, the restaurant's menu, uploading building signage etc.

You can follow other local guides and of course others can follow you. You can write reviews about places you visit and people finding those reviews helpful may... well... like the reviews. 😉

Like I said earlier, it was very helpful, educational and an interactive session. In fact, during the session I intervened and explained how I have been trying to remove a wrong pin dropped over my home for some "organic product business" which is nowhere around my place (at least not that I know of). Both Shelly and I tried several times to remove it but nothing happened. Then, during the talk, Chittesh and Aditya requested the removal of that place on Google Maps. It was immediately removed! 😊

After Pritvi's presentation, I remained in the same room to attend Abdur-Rahmaan's presentation about SQLite internals. I very much liked the presentation — digging a piece software to understand how it works internally. Abdur-Rahmaan did just that.

He started with some history about SQLite and its creator Dwayne Richard Hipp. Then, minutes later the discussion changed from story to practicals. He talked about the compiler having a parser and a code generator. The latter produces a bytecode which is then run in a VM — which in turns can be broken into several components to understand each one's functionality — like the role of a pager, btree, shim etc.

He then explained about recovery, how does SQLite avoid data corruption if there is a power outage while some write operation was still happening.

Time was short for this talk but before he completely ran out of time, Abdur-Rahmaan spoke about some alternatives/forks to SQLite — libSQL and LumoSQL.

For me, right there, it was a fruitful day and a very successful DevFest. I shared some knowledge and I learned some.

I briefly attended the last session of the day in Room 2 by Dr. Amreesh Phokeer, a Data Expert at the Internet Society.

He explained about a project he is working on at the Internet Society — Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa (MIRA). He described how he used Google Cloud products such as BigQuery and Looker Studio to create a Data Pipeline.

Lastly, the closing ceremony happened in the cafeteria. There was the list of thank you's, mentioning all sponsors, partners, attendees, volunteers and JoKi thanked the three Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) on the island — African Leadership College, Polytechnics Mauritius and the University of Mauritius — while also encouraging them to take the lead in organising future DevFests.

There were some prize giveaways following questions put by JoKi and some of the GDSC Leads.

A fruitful day with lots of learning and sharing! Thank you Google for endorsing and encouraging such activities.

Day 0

Oh, that was the eve of DevCon, the day before, when the stress level was higher than usual. We were at the Caudan Arts Centre. Shelly had to meet up with some partners who had to setup their booths at the venue. She drove alone that morning. In much anticipation and not wanting to miss the Caudan Arts Centre at the motorway junction, she ended up reaching the venue way early, like really early. I think it was even before Caudan Arts Centre opened in the morning.

Mary Jane was at the office in Q. Bornes, working on the number slips for the last day raffle. She would join us at the Caudan Arts Centre later.

I had to assist the technical team from Rogers Capital Technology Services (RCTS) to set up the Internet access across all four rooms that we had at our disposal for the conference — i.e three rooms at the ground level and the amphitheatre on level 1.

Luckily, a week before, the RCTS team had already laid out 100's of metres of ethernet cable from the network room on level 2 where the fiber connection was made till the other rooms. Therefore, on the eve, i.e Monday 21, they only had to set up the cables and access points in the ground level rooms. In total, around 450+ metres of ethernet cable and 14 WiFi Access Points were used to provide connectivity in the three rooms, the amphitheatre and the hallway.

While I was assisting the tech team of RCTS, Shelly was assisting the other DevCon partners who were setting up their booths in the hallway on level 1 and 2.

As JoKi and Mary Jane arrived during the day, we discussed about registration procedures, the number slips for the raffle and how to check-in attendees using a QR scanning app on the mobile phone. I think JoKi is planning to write a blog post on how he deployed the QR solution for the conference.

A few tweets from JoKi while he was making rounds that day.

Nirvan and Neil were at the venue helping their respective colleagues setting up their company booths. Both of them were keen to help me test some equipment in the amphitheatre.

Everything was set for #DevConMu.

Day 1

The day started early — Shelly and I picked up Pritvi and Girish at around 06h30 in the morning at Providence. Then, we stopped at the Saint-Pierre Bus Station and waited for a few minutes for Vidush to arrive. We all had tons of DevCon jokes as we headed for the Caudan Arts Centre.

Once at the venue, Shelly started operating like a clockwork. Luckily, the boys helped her to bring all the boxes of goodies, t-shirts, lanyards and badges, etc. The day before, she had tested the DevCon promo video on all the TV units available to us. Therefore, it was just a matter of switching on the TVs and letting those roll.

The registration desk was set up within a few minutes. We explained to Girish and Vidush the process of scanning the QR codes and giving the raffle ticket numbers. By eight o'clock, attendees were coming and we knew we would be overwhelmed by nine. Therefore, it was decided that we would only do the check-ins and ask attendees to come pick up their goodies after the opening ceremony which was scheduled at 10h00. I don't recall whether it was Mary Jane's or JoKi's idea to do so but it helped keep the registration process smooth.

JoKi and I shared a few details about the opening ceremony and we met in the amphitheatre a few minutes before. The amphitheatre slowly filled up and as the clock struck 10h00, it was — TIME!

We welcomed everyone and thanked them for their two-year long patience. JoKi spoke about the MSCC, the conference and what to expect over the three days — all the content varying from webdev, systems engineering, AI, blockchain to mental health.

We then thanked the sponsors for the continued trust and support. JoKi invited Arun from Liquid Intelligent Technologies and then Patrice Herve from the Mauritius Commercial Bank (MCB) to address a few words. Liquid Intelligent Technologies and MCB are top tier – diamond sponsors of the Developers Conference 2022.

Both Patrice and Arun expressed their support and satisfaction with the arrangements, as top tier sponsors of the event. They wished all the attendees to make the most out of the event. I was particularly surprised by Arun's mention of open source activities and the Linux mirrors of Mauritius. I know Liquid Telecom sponsors and hosts several open source projects and Linux distributions in Africa. I was glad to know that they are aware of what's happening in that arena in Mauritius.

I commented about Caudan Arts Centre being a much bigger venue compared to Voilà Hotel during previous DevCons. I mentioned that the place is so big with the amphitheatre and other rooms separated by a large hallway, I ended up making 10K steps the day before while assisting sponsors with their booths and completing the Internet setup. I wished everyone good health and asked them to keep a count on the number of steps for fun.

After the keynote, people spread around the venue, checking the agenda and what's up next while some people flocked to the registration desk to collect their goodies.

Well, talking about goodies, the registration desk was not the the only place to collect them. In fact, many of the DevCon partners had nice surprises at their booths.

At the Providus booth they had this really cool "spin the wheel" game to win goodies. One could collect a goodie form from our registration desk. The form asked a few details about your work experience and skills and whether you are keen to switch career/workplace. Once filled up, just queue up at the Providus booth to spin the wheel and win something.

Folks at the Liquid Intelligent Technologies booth may have appeared shy but they were really cool. We talked about telecom, cloud/hosting services and what is Liquid Tech planning to launch in Mauritius in 2023. Also, trust me, they had really nice goodies too.

Corsham Science, apart from the job vacancies, they had something really important at their booth — water bottles! Damn, it was hot in Port-Louis and with the hustle-bustle in the hallway, one would get thirsty pretty quick. They also had a nice "scan a QR" to win a goodie — a noise cancelling headphone by SONY.

Objectivity had a bunch of stuff at their booth too — t-shirts, notebooks, stress balls and even "napolitaines". All you had to do was to answer a few questions from their quiz, five questions to be precise. You get three out of five correct and you can win something. I got a stress ball! Damn, it was a stressfull day.

SWAN and RT Knits had a bunch of stationery at their booths. However, RT Knits had also a load bunch of cool electronic gadgets that they distributed during a Q&A in their presentation about "Putting AI into Manufacturing" the next day.

Nettobe had some cardboard boxes at their booth that looked like toolboxes, which they used to promote Zoho. I spoke to Jean Maurice Prosper, the CEO of Nettobe, about Zoho and a bunch of other tech that they're bringing to Mauritius and Africa. We also spoke about recruitment challenges, scarcity of skills and the need to train people on specific tech. However, sadly, I did not get my hands on one of those toolboxes — maybe next time.

Klanik's booth was very tropical and refreshing. Oh, I did not get one of those fancy sunglasses but hey I got a straw hat and a t-shirt. Hehe!

Event Store had t-shirts, tumblers, but their mega prize to their raffle was a Nintendo Switch was I will mention again later when talking about day 3.

iQera had a bunch of cool stuff too, like beach towel, cooler bag, candies and a bottle of hand sanitizer because COVID-19, after all, is not completely gone. In fact, talking about the coronavirus, Mary Jane was very strict at the registration desk with goodies too. You could point and choose which goodies you like but NOT TOUCH! Touching spreads the virus. Therefore, Mary Jane came up with a strict policy of "you touch it, you take it" and no whining later.

Let's get back to presentations and content. My next important activity of the day was the panel discussion. I was hosting a panel discussion on "Technology & the Future of Work" in the amphitheatre at 11h00. So, I had a few minutes buffer after the keynote to be able to catch up with all the panelists and then begin sharply at 11h00.

The panelists were:

• Patrice Herve, Head of Technology, MCB
• Aroun Poligadu, Chief Information Officer, iQera
• Dylan Harbour, Director of Technology, Ringier SA
• Kenneth Christiansen, Web Platform Architect & Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation

The panel discussion went smoothly. It was interesting to hear the experiences of the panelists as they delved on the questions:

• What does the future of work look like?
• Will hybrid work continue to stay post-pandemic?
• How can technology narrow the gap between developed and developing countries?
• How will AI impact the future of work and life?
• Metaverse and the workplace, is it possible in Mauritius?
• What are executives saying about the future of work?
• Can employees maintain a work-life-balance if normal office hours are replaced by flexi time?
• Can technology improve productivity without impacting on the mental health of employees?
• Is a four day week the future of work?

The discussions turned out to be extremely interesting as the panelists had more to share. Alas, I had to skip the Q&A from audience which I had timed for the last 10 mins. We had to finish on time to allow the next speaker properly set up for his presentation.

Afterward, I helped at the registration desk on and off. I spent some time working on my slides for my presentation the next day. At one point, Nirvan and Renghen looked for me to rehearse the script for their play on "The Politics & Fallacies in Agile" scheduled for the next day.

I missed some sessions that I really wanted to attend that day, like the one about "fixing a bug in the ZFS file system" by Shaan Nobee of Event Store. I think his colleague recorded that session. I really need to get my hands on that video.

I also missed the "Right to Repair Much" by Loïc Forget but he recorded the session. Thus, I'll be able to watch once it is available online.

However, the Developers Conference isn't just about sessions and talks but also about catching up with friends that you meet, maybe, once a year.

By the end of day 1, as we cleared up the registration desk, we were totally knackered.

The end of day 1 is celebrated by a sponsored Happy Hour. It was held at the Caudan Arts Centre itself on level 1 outside the amphitheatre. It was sponsored by Spoon Consulting.

Day 2

We had the same trip on the morning of day 2, i.e pick up Pritvi, Girish and Vidush. Once we reached Caudan Arts Centre we had it like Shelly's clock-work — setting up the registration desk and checking the rooms.

I drank a Lucozade to keep me from being drowsy. I went to sleep late and woke up at around 04h00. Fatigue was apparent. Oh... but the day hadn't begun yet.

I was told there was some technical issues with the display in the Smallville room. I went to check. Mohamed Edun from Providus had his session scheduled at 09h00 in that room. I called a technician from the Caudan Arts Centre's support team.

Mohamed was able to proceed with his presentation and he had a nice crowd for a morning session.

Similarly, Yovan Fowdar had a pretty much full room for his presentation "ESP8266 A Practical Approach". Yovan is one of the most active members of the Mauritius Makers Community.

At the same time in the amphitheatre, Avinash Meetoo was delivering "A Brief History of Programming".

At 11h00, Kendall Tang and Heman Mohabeer from RT Knits talked about "Putting AI into Action in Manufacturing".

For this session, they had quite some electronic gadgets ready as giveaways for their Q&A. Keyboards, headphones... but what stood out was their big prize — an iPad (not shown in the photo below).

Then, I quickly rushed to peek into the Elastic Stack session by Girish Mahabir, just to wish him good luck. He was speaking at DevCon for the first time and was nervous since the morning. He deserved a thumbs up.

At 15h00, I had to be in the amphitheatre as a voice-over actor in a play by Renghen & Nirvan entitled "The Politics & Fallacies in Agile". This was an interesting one, a different concept of presenting a methodology, an opinion or an idea. Is Agile being properly implemented in companies? Many companies boast that they have adopted Agile methodologies but did that actually improved productivity, reduced cost or the lives of the developers are any better?

In the play, there are two protagonists, Nirvan acts as the CTO of a company who wants to make his company reap more profit and thus become the Most Valuable Person in the eyes of the shareholders. Renghen plays the role of a greedy consultant who only promises Nirvan false dreams. Later on, Renghen also plays the role of Renpheus, a senior developer in the company, to whom Nirvan (this time acting as Neovan) reaches to for guidance about "what is Agile?".

In this play, Nivesh changes the slides while, me, I act as a narrator throughout the play. As the chapters change, I give a little bit of context on what's happening on stage.

I was done for the day, kaput... tired! But guess what, I still had my presentation on "Securing and Managing your own mail server" scheduled at... hmm... right after this session, i.e 16h00. What a timing? Ahaa.. also, guess what, I was in the team working on the agenda. My bad! I should have complained to myself for this blunder. #facepalm

I was knackered, drowsy... and I apologised to the audience who really wanted to learn about building their own mail server. I started the session with a little bit of drowsiness but I was able to pick up along.

After ther presentation, I gathered some energy and dragged myself to the Happy Hour happening on level 1. It was sponsored by Alludo.

See me on the left, running away with the last tiny plate of tiny tomatoes and mozarella. Later, I learned that the hungry vegetarians (Aditya, Nirvan, etc...) had devoured everything before I arrived.

Nonetheless, we all had loads of fun. Tired but happy.

In fact, those staring at that large curvy screen are actually playing a game and winners get a software license from Alludo. I think there were a few software licenses to win as prize. Alex wrote in his conference report that he won a license for Parallels Desktop. Cool! I'm using Parallels Desktop to run ARM64 Linux on my Apple MacBook M1 — love it! Most of my Linux mirrors testing work runs on this. 😊

Day 3

Ah! The last day of DevCon is always like having mixed feelings. You are sad that it is ending... but you are also glad that you have less stress. Yes, I was still very tired from the previous days. In fact, I again started the day drinking a Lucozade as we reached Caudan Arts Centre at around 07h30 — the same trip, with Shelly and the boys.

Oh... by the way, by now, I think you must have known that Shelly and I are married. ❤️ No funny business is happening by waking up at 04h00 and hitting the road at 06h30. Also, we have a young kid of 1 yr 5 months, who also attended the Developers Conference on the last day, to collect his first DevCon badge. Are you a conference badge collector, yet?

I had a session at 11h00 on "Authenticating Open Source Cloud Applications using LDAP" which was a follow-up session from the previous day. In the first session, we built a mail server and discussed about the individual components and their role. One important part of the mail server was the Directory Service provided by OpenLDAP.

In the second part of the session, that is on the last day, we used the same mail server that we built the day before and expanded on the LDAP part. I explained about LDAP from ground-up, mentioning different RFCs, talked about the protocol, the Directory Information Model, the LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) etc. We looked at query filters and how those can be leveraged to allow authentication from other applications based on specific rules.

Despite the fatigue, I was glad that the session was useful and we had a nice interaction talking about security mechanisms.

Right after my LDAP session, in the adjacent room I had another session on "Ghost Theme Development" at noon. My co-speaker in that session, Kushul Soomaree, was getting worried because the room was full... people were standing at the back and I hadn't shown my face yet.

But... nonetheless, I think we delivered that presentation pretty well. We had divided the session into two parts. The first half I spoke about "Handlebars" and how to create a Ghost theme from scratch, with just 2 - 3 files and start writing a bunch of HTML code. I showed the source code of my own blog's theme as example.

In the second half, Kushul explained how to leverage on the Ghost API and loop through the content using any Front-End framework. He showed how he did that for his own blog using Vue.js.

After delivering two sessions, back to back, one might think, okay that's good for the day... but alas, no. I had an hour break then I had to rush to the aphitheatre for Lightning Talks hosted by Sandeep Ramgolam at 15h00.

I asked Sandeep what's the plan... like the schedule for the lightning speakers and he replied that I'd speak first. That suited me well. I could deliver my talk and rush downstairs, meet Shelly, Mary Jane and others at the desk to discuss the closing ceremony. Oh yeah, I had a ceremonial role at 16h00. 🤯

I spoke about the Linux mirrors in Mauritius, how it started? How I struggled to get Internet Service Providers in Mauritius to provide servers and bandwidth for this project. The only ISP receptive to the idea was Rogers Capital Technology Services. Coincidentally, at around the same time, David Venter, the Managing Director of cloud.mu, pinged me asking whether I would be interested in setting up an openSUSE mirror in Mauritius since I was involved in the openSUSE project. My reply was affirmative, obviously.

However, that's how the journey of the Linux mirrors in Mauritius began. We started with openSUSE but today the mirror project hosts the following Linux distros, thanks to the generous sponsorship and support from cloud.mu:

• AlmaLinux
• Fedora Linux
• openSUSE
• Ubuntu

In fact, after the conference, I read Alex's blog post, in which he mentioned this part of the Lightning Talks with a comment, "sadly no Arch or Mint yet". Shortly after, David and I had a chat, the servers for Arch and Mint repos have been provisioned. I have already synced the Mint mirror server with the upstream project. In the coming days, I will wrap up some final configs and officialise the mirror through the Mint project. Arch will follow soon.

After my talk, I went at the registration desk. We discussed the closing ceremony, the raffle, giveaway prizes etc. JoKi and I, we set to meet in the amphitheatre to sync "our notes" on the closing.

I went back to the amphitheatre at around 15h30, I think.

JoKi was sitting on the far right side in the second or third row with his Chromebook — preparing some slides, graphics and stats. By that time, I got to attend at least three lightning talks, while discussing a few things with JoKi.

I was mind-blown by this presentation by Chittesh. He made live music demo and his dialogue delivery was on point. I had never seen a music nerd before. Really enjoyed this one — not just me, I could also hear my kid babbling somewhere in the amphitheatre every time Chittesh would tune up his music software — like my kid had some very important comment to make about that piece of tune.

Lastly, Sandeep presented Codeflow and used his personal project, "Power Outages in Mauritius" to demo the same.

Lightning Talks ended at around 15h50.

We had a few minutes to set up the laptop, and bring the raffle giveaways backstage. We informed everyone downstairs that the closing ceremony was about to begin, so they could finish whatever they were doing and join us in the amphitheatre.

The amphitheatre filled up pretty quick.

Without delaying any further, we started the list of thank you's. Thanking all attendees, speakers, sponsors & partners, volunteers and the technical and non-technical staff of the Caudan Arts Centre. We opened the conference website, scrolled through the partners section and thanked every company individually.

We invited our titanium partners SWAN and Providus to share a few words and their experience at DevCon 2022.

The thank you's continued.

We must have missed a lot of names there but folks, know that you are in our heart. The names that we quickly typed were those who actively helped at the registration desk and thus the names were at the finger's tip.

To all fellow craftsmen whose name we missed, let's hug. 🤗

We gave a bouquet as a token of appreciation to Mary Jane and Shelly for all the efforts they've put into the two years of making DevCon 2022.

We had plenty of giveaways... raffle... we even tried funny questions or even very easy questions.

Earlier on Twitter, Chervine Bhiwoo published the results for the Social Media Hero challenge — basically meaning who tweeted the most using the #DevConMu hashtag over the three days.

Arshad Pooloo won that challenge. We called his name but he wasn't in the amphitheatre. He was at work. However, Didier Bephage, Technology Director at SD WORX came to pick up the prize for him and Arshad was united with his prize the next morning.

Event Store also informed us the name of the winner of their giveaway — the Nintendo Switch.

Keshava was not in the amphitheatre at the time we announced his name as winner of the Nintendo Switch offered by Event Store. However, later he was able to collect his prize.

That was a wrap!

As we reached the end of the event, we had a group photo with some of the volunteers and we unveiled the theme for next year's DevCon. You got it right, it's Space!

DevCon 2023 will be held on 20, 21 and 22 July. Do not forget to Google the date. 😉

Then, as the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, negotiation with the venue and sponsors started. After months of preparation and the support of over 30+ sponsors, the dates for the Developers Conference 2022 were announced — 22, 23 and 24 November.

Therefore, there are just two week-ends remaining then we will all meet at the Caudan Arts Centre for DevCon 2022. 🎉

I am yet to work on my slides for the following presentations:

• Securing and managing your own mail server
• Authenticating open source cloud applications with LDAP
• Ghost theme development

I am hopeful that they will be completed in time. 😆

There will be plenty of awesome presentations by equally awesome speakers, some who probably you're acquainted with. Meet this year's DevCon speakers and plan your conference schedule as per sessions you would not want to miss at all. 🤓 I certainly would not want to miss anything, ANYTHING! 😉

DevCon, as many call it, will be held at the Caudan Arts Centre, on 22, 23 and 24 November 2022. A lot of geeks, nerds, and other awesome human beings of the island have been patiently waiting for this conference for the past two years. Indeed, the last physical conference that we attended was in 2019 at the Voilà Hotel. Many of us had a great time, a blast even.

What is the Developers Conference?

DevCon is a community-driven three-days tech event involving developers, sysadmins, engineers, project managers, and other professionals of the ICT industry who meet and greet, present topics of interest, have beer/coffee/cold drinks together in the evenings.

The conference is made possible by the support of the tech community on the island and the financial backing of the generous sponsors.

The conference is free of charge to attend but registration is compulsory.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we could not organise a physical conference in 2020 and 2021. In September 2020, we wid have a virtual DevCon but the feeling and enthusiasm isn't the same as meeting people in real life.

You may peek in the sessions agenda of DevCon 2019 to get an idea on the types topics that are presented.

The agenda for DevCon 2022 is still being finalised. It should be available in a few weeks time, but for time save the dates in your calendar — 22, 23 & 24 November 2022. See you at the Caudan Arts Centre. 🤓

Many AFRINIC Resource Members look forward to this meeting and they travel every year to attend the meeting in person. Others who cannot make it can still participate and ask questions via the online conference system.

I have been attending AFRINIC Meetings since 2017. I have attended a few meetings online and two of the meetings in-person. I have attended the meetings as a Resource Member since 2019. I have never seen AFRINIC restricting Resource Members from attending the AGMM in the past.

Today, in a email the AFRINIC Legal Team informed members that due to the prevailing sanitary protocol in Mauritius, only one representative of a Resource Member will be allowed to attend the meeting in-person. However, to the astonishment and incomprehension of several members, the legal team also stated that only one representative per Resource Member will be allowed to join the meeting via the online conference system.

Several members have raised questions over this statement. I questioned the legal team about it and in response the AFRINIC Communications team stated that —

Article 12.14(9) provides, inter-alia as follows - "Corporations may act by representative. A corporate body, which is a Member, may appoint a representative to attend an Annual General Members’ Meeting on its behalf in the same manner as that in which it could appoint a proxy.”.

The AFRINIC Bylaws, from which the above article is quoted, does not state that a corporate body, which is a Member, can be represented by one person only.

The Developers Conference (DevCon) was due to happen on the 17ᵗʰ, 18ᵗʰ and 19ᵗʰ of February 2022 at the Caudan Arts Centre. We were hoping that restrictions would be eased before the DevCon day. Unfortunately, that did not happen. No new dates have not been announced as that would be pending negotiation with the conference venue owner and several other stakeholders.

Last year, there was no DevCon 2021 and the year before DevCon 2020 also was postponed until a virtual DevCon was done the same year. Sponsors for DevCon 2020 had their sponsorship tiers carried forwarded until a physical conference could be organised again.

It saddens to see the event being postponed again but we should be better safe than sorry. The sanitary restrictions are imposed for a reason and we should all act responsibly for the safety of everyone

Let's hope for a better tomorrow and that DevCon may happen this year. 🤞