Two talks were on the agenda:

1. What is Enterprise Architecture and Why Should Developers Care? — by Ajmal Saifudeen
2. A 12-Factor Roadmap for Modern PHP Infrastructure — by Ish Sookun (myself)

Before the talks, Nirvan Pagooah, Engineering Manager at Klanik, welcomed the group and gave a brief presentation about the company, its activities, and the current open positions.

Enterprise Architecture: Not Just for the Big Players

Ajmal Saifudeen from Enterprise Architects Ltd kicked things off with a presentation that tackled a subject most developers in Mauritius rarely encounter head-on: Enterprise Architecture (EA).

Ajmal opened by framing the Mauritius context. Few organisations on the island have a formal EA practice — or even know what EA is. Most developers never interact with it directly. Yet, as he pointed out, Enterprise Architecture shapes the very environment in which all development happens. Whether you're aware of it or not, EA decisions (or the absence of them) affect every line of code you ship.

Before diving into the enterprise side, Ajmal grounded the audience in what "architecture" means in a general sense. He broke it down into four pillars:

• a blueprint that guides constructors on how and when to build;
• a context — a boundary defined by locality;
• a set of guidelines to follow;
• a set of standards to adhere to.

Simple, but a useful mental model for the discussion that followed.

One of the striking slides was the iceberg analogy for why good architecture matters. Above the waterline sit the external touchpoints — websites, mobile apps, conversational interfaces — the parts users see. Below the surface lurk the problems that plague organisations without solid architecture: lack of agility, complex and disparate systems, organisational silos, poorly managed data, weak resource planning, and ballooning operational costs. The message was clear — what the customer sees is only the tip; the bulk of the challenge lies underneath.

What EA Is (and What It Is Not)

Ajmal offered a concise definition: Enterprise Architecture is the practice of designing how a business operates and how technology supports it, so that technical solutions are purposeful, scalable, and aligned with business goals.

He was equally clear about common misconceptions. EA is not just documentation. It is not a rigid bureaucracy. And importantly, it is not only for large corporates — a point that resonated with an audience largely composed of developers working across a mix of startup, mid-size, and enterprise environments in Mauritius.

Ajmal walked through the EA mandate using a layered pyramid model, spanning from Technology Architecture at the base through Integration, Application, and Information Architecture up to Business Architecture at the apex. Each layer maps to a landscape view — technology, integration, application, data, and business — and the whole stack is driven from the top (business strategy) while being enabled from the bottom (technology capabilities). It was a clear illustration of how EA bridges the gap between what the business wants and what IT delivers.

Sadly, I missed the closing segment of his presentation as I attended a phone call. 😔

A 12-Factor Roadmap for Modern PHP Infrastructure

After Ajmal's talk, I took the floor with a presentation on applying the twelve-factor app methodology to modern PHP infrastructure — specifically Laravel.

Origins and Staying Power

I opened with the backstory. The 12-Factor methodology was created by Adam Wiggins and the Heroku engineering team, published in November 2011 at 12factor.net. It codified the patterns they observed separating apps that scaled reliably from those that repeatedly failed on their platform. What makes it enduring is that Docker (2013) and Kubernetes (2014) both validated its principles, and today serverless, microservices, and CI/CD pipelines all build on the same foundations. Organisations like Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Google Cloud, and AWS publicly endorse and implement 12-Factor patterns across their platforms.

The Twelve Factors in Brief

I walked through all twelve factors in two groups. Factors I through VI cover the foundation: a single codebase tracked in version control with many deploys, explicitly declared dependencies via composer.json, configuration stored in environment variables rather than code, backing services (databases, caches, queues) treated as attached resources, strict separation of build/release/run stages, and stateless share-nothing processes.

Factors VII through XII cover runtime and operations: self-contained port binding (Laravel Octane serving on a port), horizontal scaling via the process model, fast startup and graceful shutdown for disposability, keeping dev/staging/production as similar as possible, treating logs as event streams rather than files, and running admin tasks (migrations, seeders) as one-off processes through Artisan.

Laravel × 12-Factor: A Natural Fit

The core of the talk demonstrated how Laravel's architecture aligns with 12-Factor almost by design. The .env file and env() helper give you Factor III (Config) out of the box. composer.json handles Factor II (Dependencies). The driver-based service abstraction in config/database.php, config/cache.php, and config/filesystems.php is Factor IV (Backing Services) in action — you can swap from MySQL to PostgreSQL, from file cache to Redis, or from local disk to S3, all by changing a single environment variable with zero code changes.

For Factors XI and XII, Laravel's Monolog integration routes logs to stderr in production containers, where the platform (Fluentd, Loki, CloudWatch) handles collection. Artisan provides the CLI for migrations, cache clearing, queue management, and custom one-off commands — in Kubernetes, these run as initContainers or Jobs.

Local Dev Parity with Laravel Herd

A significant portion of the talk focused on Factor X (Dev/Prod Parity) through Laravel Herd. Herd is a native PHP development environment for macOS and Windows that provides zero-configuration setup, automatic .test domains with HTTPS, multiple PHP version support (8.1 through 8.5), and built-in services including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Mailpit, and MinIO for S3-compatible storage. A herd.yml file declares the site configuration declaratively.

I contrasted the local Herd setup against a production Kubernetes deployment side by side: locally you run file cache, sync queues, and local disk; in production it's Redis cache, Redis queues, and S3 storage — but the application code, routes, and business logic remain identical. Only the .env changes.

Lunch and Open Discussion

Post-lunch, we shifted into an open discussion that brought both topics together. Questions ranged from how EA principles can inform infrastructure decisions to how the twelve-factor approach can serve as a lightweight architectural discipline even in organisations without a formal EA function. The cross-pollination between the two talks made for a richer conversation than either topic would have generated in isolation.

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.

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.

We started at 10h35 after a casual chat with some pastries and drinks.

JoKi greeted everyone as always, thanking our host, FRCI and reminding some house rules. He also pointed out that the Call for Papers for the Developers Conference is now open.

All the MSCC meetups till the end of the year are already scheduled on the community's Meetup page. The location for some of the meetups might change or be confirmed later on but the topics are there. So, anyone can have a glance and plan ahead which meetup they would most likely attend.

The first speaker Kevyn Bapset presented, "From Ideation to Implementation — A Design Thinking Journey."

We discussed about the prototyping phase and why it is helpful to present the client a prototype in monochrome and wireframes. It prevents any distraction caused by colors being too light, too dark or not being the correct color at all. Vidush and JoKi shared their experience on how clients reacted to initial color choices in a prototype, button size and even dummy data.

We had a short break after Kevyn's presentation.

The next speaker, Olivier André, spoke about "Implementing Design Systems for Scalable Products, A Guide to Streamlining Collaboration and Scalability."

Our last speaker of the day, Vidush Namah, talked about ".NET Blazor — A Practical Approach to Modular UI."

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.

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.

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. 🤓

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. 🤞