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.

On the day, i.e Saturday 12 July, I had a talk scheduled on "Container Runtimes."

It's been a while that I wanted to do this talk and dive into the lower realms of container management. We often talk about and demo container orchestration using high level tools, while not giving much attention to the underlying technologies. Therefore, my talk was like a primer on Linux namespaces and cgroups, followed by an introduction to container engines, mentioning the low-level and high-level ones.

Before my talk, I had a very interesting discussion with Renghen. As he was going through my slide deck, he noticed that I mentioned cgroups and he pointed out that all the modern features that we enjoy in container orchestration have been enabled thanks to cgroups v2 which was a complete overhaul of version 1, not just an update. Cgroup v2 provides more granular control over resource allocation, brought rootless features, simplifies resource management under one single unified hierarchy, among other improvements. I took note of that and included it when I spoke about control groups.

I shared a list of current actively developed container runtimes, among which I highlighted youki — a container runtime written in Rust. I co-maintain the youki package on the openSUSE Build Service and I wanted to share how I am using youki as an experiment to dive deeper and learn more about the low-level workings of container management.

Youki creates and starts a container but you will need a higher level container engine to actually manage your container resources. For that, I mentioned Podman. In fact, I asked how many in the room knew about Podman and to my surprise many raised their hands. It turns out that Podman is being heavily favoured over Docker by the development team at Accenture — something I was very glad to hear as a proponent of Podman since its inception. I did an introduction to Podman at the Middlesex University in 2019, the same year the stable version of Podman was released. Since then, Podman has always been my demo tool when talking about containers.

I happily shared a few SUSE geeko plushies with the attendees that were able to answer questions that I asked about container runtimes at the end of my presentation.

Dr. Ramtohul briefly spoke about the company and its software products. He shared a few personal memories about Corel Draw from several years ago.

He also informed the audience that Alludo was hiring for about 20 positions that needed to be filled and that interviews were being conducted on the same day on the 9th floor of the building. This was an excellent opportunity for attendees to explore career opportunities in the tech industry and potentially join a dynamic and growing software company.

Chittesh Sham, a DevOps Engineer at Alludo, was one of the three speakers at the meetup. He spoke about about Terraform and AWS. He shared his knowledge on how to use Terraform, an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, to manage infrastructure resources on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

He provided an in-depth overview of the various AWS resources and services that are available. He then demonstrated how to use Terraform to provision an EC2 instance on AWS and deploy a WordPress site on that instance. This was an excellent example of how Terraform can be used to manage infrastructure resources on AWS and other cloud service providers.

The second speaker, Doosan Pagooah, presented on Kubernetes CI/CD with Gitlab & Argo CD. He discussed how to use GitLab and Argo CD to set up a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline for Kubernetes, a popular container orchestration system.

Doosan recommended attendees to read Terraform: Up and Running, 3rd Edition by Yevgeniy Brikman to learn more advanced concepts.

The third speaker, Jochen Kirstätter, gave a talk on Gcloud scripting for Google Cloud Platform. He shared his expertise on using Gcloud, a command-line interface tool, to interact with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources and automate GCP tasks.

The meetup was well-attended and lasted for approximately five hours, from 10 a.m to 3 p.m. Attendees were served a finger lunch, which included both vegetarian and non-vegetarian snacks, during a lunch break. There were also short coffee/tea breaks.

Overall, the MSCC meetup was an informative and engaging event for software developers who are interested in learning about cloud provisioning tools. The speakers provided valuable insights and practical tips for using Terraform, Kubernetes, Gitlab, ArgoCD, Gcloud, AWS, and GCP to build scalable and reliable cloud-based applications.

The meetup theme was .NET and there were three speakers lined up:

• Dhanesh Purdaseea — They said serverless, I said Azure Function
• Vidush Namah — Xamarin vs .NET MAUI
• Jochen Kirstätter — .NET minimal API

After a very long time, I met Kishan Bhugul, who is currently back to Mauritius. I know Kishan since he university days and he was an active community member attending meetups and helping during events — especially during the Linux festivals we used to organise back then. We had a nice catch-up about work and the Ignite 2022 conference by Palo Alto Networks that he attended recently.

For the most part, I sat at the back and did some dev work while commenting about .NET with Renghen, Neil and Nythiennzo.

We had pizza for lunch, courtesy of SD Worx – very much appreciated, especially for the vegetarian option. 😊

Meetup ended at around 3 p.m with a lengthy discussion about .NET minimal API, the performance of .NET, scalability of applications, etc.

Also, instead of the usual presentation in conference rooms this time the presentations were done outside in a casual way. It was different but really nice — plenty of sunlight and no need for air conditioning.

I did not count but there seemed to be some thirty or so attendees.

Sandeep welcomed the attendees. He did a quick introduction about the Front-End Coders, like in every meetup, and thanked ACENSI Mauritius for sponsoring the venue.

Right after, he invited Reena Seetohul, the Managing Director of ACENSI Mauritius to speak about the company and what they do.

Reena introduced herself, told us a little about her professional parcour and the setting up of ACENSI Mauritius HQ in Helvetia, in a beautiful colonial-era building. She gave some brief stats about the company and its global business.

Reena spoke about the work culture at ACENSI Mauritius. They're currently recruiting and looking for various profiles in web development, data & analytics, administration and HR. Reach out to them on LinkedIn for more info.

Nadeem Nayeck, the Technical Director of ACENSI Mauritius, spoke about their technology stack. I was particularly glad to hear that he is an avid Gentoo user. 🐧

Lightning Talks ⚡

Bun – a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime

Sandeep talked about Bun. I was like, aargh, one more JavaScript technology to know about. They keep popping week after week.

Sli.dev – presentation tool for developers

Mahima presented a new fancy tool that developers can use to make "fancy" presentations. It's called Slidev.

Unlike traditional WYSIWYG presentation software or webapps, Slidev provides developers a different way to create interactive presentations. It uses the Markdown format and the slides content are all in just one single plain text file. Thus, developers can use their current tools, such as their favourite text editor, and create presentations.

Web Assembly

The next presentation was by Arwin Neil Baichoo. He talked about WebAssembly. He showed how he could write a program in Rust, compile it to WebAssembly and then run it in the browser.

Neil spoke about the use cases of WebAssembly by popular applications, such as Figma.

He did a live demo, converting a video into GIF in the browser using ffmpeg.wasm. His demo page is available at arwinneil-ffmpgwasm.netlify.app.

Photogrammetry

Jordan spoke about Photogrammetry. He explained the art and science behind photogrammetry. The term was new to me. It took me a few mins to understand that it meant image stitching – a term I first learned in 2018 when Richard Brown, the former Chairman of the openSUSE Project, explained how he made panoramas from multiple photos that he took.

Jordan's passion for drone photography was obvious from his presentation.

Splade – the magic of Inertia.js with the simplicity of Blade

I was looking forward to this presentation when the meetup agenda was announced. Splade is a new project. Its first version was released a month ago only – to be precise on 22 July 2022, which makes the project one month old today. 👏 🎂 🥳

Splade is developed by Pascal Baljet. I had read some of his tweets in the past that contained valuable Laravel tips. I didn't keep on eye on his latest project though. That's why I was keen to learn more on Splade through Percy's presentation.

Percy spoke about Splade components. He did a few demos showing how one could create a modal without writing any JavaScript and not leaving the comfort of the Blade view. That's what I like. It was really akin to Laravel Livewire except that Livewire still relies on Laravel for routing, whereas with Splade one can create a Single-Page App (SPA) thanks to the underlying Vue.js.

Percy showed exactly that by using the Link component of Splade, which does not require a full page reload when fetching a new page.

<Link href="https://sysadmin-journal.com/">Home</Link>
<Link href="{{ route('contact') }}">Contact</Link>

I took the above code example taken from the Splade documentation.

After his presentation, I had a chat with Percy to see whether he tried to publish the components and customise them. He said he did not try it but he quickly checked and indeed the Blade templates can be published.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="ProtoneMedia\Splade\ServiceProvider"

The templates should be available in the /resources/views/vendor/splade directory.

Lunch 🍕

Lunch was fully sponsored by ACENSI Mauritius. We had some great pizzas from L'Ardoise restaurant and various cold drinks. Also, the coffee was awesome!

Contracting: Sharpening the edge to deliver

Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer, the founder of the Python Mauritius User Group, shared his experience about freelancing. He explained how to make a choice of tech based on information that we see on GitHub or GitLab. Should it be because a project has a lot of stars, a lot of forks, or what? It seems that the number of forks is considered a right assessment of a project's health.

He spoke about clients expectations and that we should not be ambiguous on time estimates. For example we cannot keep a client waiting for a year to deliver something.

Again, talking about tech, Abdur-Rahmaan's general advice is to learn a technology and learn it well. He says that it's good to know a lot of things but mastering one particular technology has its advantage in the industry.

Abdur-Rahmaan's presentation slides are available at GitHub.

Carbon Lang

Renghen spoke about the Carbon Language. This is a new programming language that aims to attract the C++ community of developers.

Renghen started his presentation with some history of C++ and things that are wrong about the programming language – like its broken type system, its over complexity, etc. Something that was apparent in his slides was that C++ was « soul sucking » which caused quite a bit of laugh.

He mentioned how C++ is regulated by the Standard C++ Foundation and there are downsides to how the organisation operates – like too many companies trying to push their agenda through.

Renghen said that Nim, D, Zig and Rust are better alternatives to C++.

Lastly, he spoke about Carbon Lang which he compares to what TypeScript is trying to do with JavaScript. He said that Carbon Lang is currently more a hype than real tech. Most of the working code may not work after a few commits. He also said that Carbon Lang is a Google technology, thus, its future is bleak.

Astro: fast websites next-gen island architecture

The last presentation was by Michaël Jules, a.k.a Mike. He spoke about Astro, a web framework that let's you build fast websites using tools that you already love. I didn't understand it at first. Is it a framework that let's you use other frameworks?

Then, Mike explained the concept behind. He explained about "island architecture", something I heard for the first time. The idea is to reduce the amount of JavaScript shipped on production. A lot of times these are unused JavaScript code.

Astro Islands (aka Component Islands) are a pattern of web architecture pioneered by Astro. The idea of “islands architecture” was first coined by Etsy’s frontend architect Katie Sylor-Miller in 2019, and expanded on in this post by Preact creator Jason Miller.

Astro generates every website with zero client-side JavaScript, by default. Use a frontend UI component built with React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, SolidJS, AlpineJS, or Lit and Astro will automatically render it to HTML ahead of time and then strip out all of the JavaScript. This keeps every site fast by default by removing all unused JavaScript from the page.

Meetup ended by 14h00. Many of us stayed around for another hour meeting everyone and continuing to chat about work, projects and the work/life/balance.

Earlier in January, we had perhaps the first meetup, non-virtual, in a very long time, which was organised by the Linux User Group of Mauritius.

The Front-end Coders meetup was scheduled between 10h00 — 14h00 in the office premises of Prodigious. I had never been to their office before but finding the place was not a trouble. Also, there was no issue finding a parking space.

Shelly dropped me at Prodigious. We picked up Renghen along the way, from the University of Mauritius campus. We were at Prodigious at around 10h00. Kushul's and Sandeep's cars were in the parking lot of Maeva Tower.

I called Kushul to ask whether the presentations had begun. He said that people were still coming. Within a few minutes he came down the parking lot to show us the way to the office, which is on the 2nd floor of the building — a spacious and cozy place.

By 10:30 most people who had RSVP'ed had arrived. Some 20+ people attended the meetup.  Sandeep made an introductory speech.

He talked about the Front-end Coders and the agenda of the day. He thanked the meetup sponsors, Prodigious for the venue and Ringier for sponsoring lunch. He mentioned that they are trying to bring back the monthly meetups. The next one will be in May and the topic will be React, although no date has been fixed yet. In fact, they are still looking for a venue sponsor — so, if someone can arrange that, it would be a great help!

Sandeep mentioned that he closed the Front-end Coders page on Meetup.com. He explained the reason. The Meetup.com subscription costs about $120 yearly and while there were no meetups during Covid-19 restrictions in Mauritius, he still had to pay those fees. He said the meetup announcements are now made on their Facebook page instead and they also have setup a website to publish the events details.

The first presentation of the day was done by Mahima. She did an introduction to Tailwind CSS. She explained the concept of utility classes and did live coding to explain Grid and Flexbox concepts using Tailwind CSS.

Mahima gave an overview of some new features in Tailwind CSS v3.0 such as the Just-in-Time (JIT) engine and fancy underline styles. You can read more about these new features from the Tailwind CSS v3.0 blog post by Adam Wathan.

The next presentation was done was Jules. He spoke about Reactivity. He used the Vue.js Reactivity API. I am not familiar with Vue.js, less even with concepts of reactivity in JavaScript. Nevertheless, Jules did an extremely fun demo to engage the audience.

Jules talked about reactivity in browsers and the different methods to achieve it, starting from legacy methods, such as JQuery, to modern frameworks like Vue.js, React, Angular, Svelte, etc. He pointed out a useful resource to Learn Advanced JavaScript, by John Resig, the creator of JQuery.

Jules then explained how he could leverage the Vue.js Reactivity API in non-Vue.js applications — i.e using it outside Vue.js. He showed the code a of Node.js CLI application that he wrote to demonstrate the same.

The Vue.js website has a clear & concise documentation that explains Reactivity fundamentals. If you want to delve further into the topic, give it a hit.

At lunch time, we gathered in the mess room and we shared pizza from Aqua Farina, which was sponsored by folks from Ringier.

After lunch, we had a final presentation. It was done by Sandeep and the topic was Open Data in Mauritius. He went though a few of his pet projects for which he used data available locally from various sources — such as the CEB website, the Meteorological Services website and the Open Data portal of the Government of Mauritius.

He explained the hassle and difficulty in obtaining weather related data from the Meteorological Services of Mauritius. He shared his experience on meeting the Meteo personnel and trying to convince them to provide the data in an open format. The latter didn't seem to show any interest in such and instead told Sandeep that whatever data is available on the Meteo website, he can use for free. That entails scraping and parsing data from an HTML page.

Sandeep had to do adopt a similar approach when he built the page on Power Outages in Mauritius.

On the other hand, the Open Data portal provides statistical data in a more programmable way, but the hiccup is it's not always up-to-date.

Meetup ended some time past 14h00. It was a great catch-up after a very long time and I hope to see as many people or more in the next meetup.

मीटअप को meetup.com पर प्रकाशित किया गया था और उपस्थित लोग YouTube पर प्रस्तुति को लाइव देख सकते थे। उपस्थित लोग YouTube लाइव प्रस्तुति पर भी टिप्पणी कर सकते हैं और उन टिप्पणियों को मॉडरेटर्स रिवू और अत्री, एनरिक को सूचित कर रहे थे। रिवू और अत्री कोलकाता कोटलिन यूजर ग्रुप के मीटअप आयोजक हैं।

गलत स्क्रीन डिस्प्ले की तकनीकी त्रुटि के कारण, पहले अट्ठाईस मिनट के प्रस्तुतीकरण का पालन करना आसान नहीं होगा। इसलिए, मेरा सुझाव है कि आप वीडियो को अट्ठाईसवें मिनट से देखना शुरू करें। प्रस्तुति के अंतिम दस मिनटों में एनरिक ने Ktor वेब फ्रेमवर्क की मूल बातें कही।

Yesterday, I attended the MSCC Code & Coffee meetup at Mugg & Bean. It reminded me of the good old days of being a frequent meetup attendee and all those geek talks that happened around those Mugg & Bean tables with long hours drinking coffee.

JoKi and Mary Jane were already there along with little Liam when I arrived. He's the youngest geek I've seen attending meetups so far. Shortly, we were joined by Marine and Abdur-Rahmaan. We debriefed about the Developers Conference which happened the weekend before. We talked about the good, the bad and the room that always requires improvement; but in short it was a successful conference. Not to mention that discussion for the Developers Conference 2020 has already begun.

I met Abdur-Rahmaan for the first time during the Developers Conference, when he introduced himself as one of the members of the Python Mauritius Users Group (PYMUG). Then yesterday we continued talking about the efforts to keep a community/user group alive. There was a Python Users Group around 2013/14 but it didn't remain active for long. The new members surely have ideas to to things differently and Abdur-Rahmaan seems a committed fellow.

I left around half past noon with a good feeling of re-visiting old times.