Cloud Native Hacktoberfest 2025

I organised a thing... It was pretty neat. So obviously I'm going to write a million words so those who didn't attend can feel bad about themselves. And yes, this will be a million words; I am telling the whole story.

The Introduction

I have been fascinated with the ideas of hackathons for a long time. Back in Form 5 of secondary school, I had just joined the tech community and heard tales of these events; held in a bungalow and with a group of friends getting together to contribute to open source projects. The only experience I had like this was at SDWorx several years back for WebCup where me and a few friends got together to make an awful website while eating junk food, sleeping little, and just messing around. I was determined to host an event like this at some point with Cloud Native Mauritius, and I got the perfect opportunity - Hacktoberfest.

Hacktoberfest is an event running throughout October which encourages participants across the world to contribute to open source projects. In exchange for your participation, you get a badge on your GitHub profile (bragging rights) and potentially a T-shirt (more bragging rights). I seized this opportunity to gather friends and community members at a bungalow to code together.

The Planning

Discussions started in the Cloud Native Mauritius Telegram group. Eventually though, the conversation got so intense, I had to move it to a separate Hacktoberfest group chat. I used this group to communicate all the updates and coordinate things like food and location.

Speaking of location, we had to find a bungalow which would fit some 11 people with their laptops. We didn't care much about beds as we would find space on the floor and sofas if needed. One of the important criteria was proximity to the beach and after some fierce debate, settled on hosting the event in the North, which has better connectivity with the main motorway. For reference for my international readers, Mauritius is only 61km "tall" so the people complaining about roads were undoubtedly being overly dramatic, but I digress.

A big issue we had with the location was that we only needed one night but most of the AirBNB's had a minimum stay of 2 to 3 nights. Another issue is that hosts were not exactly thrilled at the idea of accommodating a "party" of 12 people. Eventually though, we found a place and I asked Nathan, a friend, to reach the host and negotiate on people, cost, and how long we could stay. Without going into the details, the diplomacy succeeded and we had a venue. Admittedly, we had only settled on the place a week before the event!

Day 0 - The Preparations

One uncertainty with the bungalow was connectivity. I am used to 200/50 Mbps at home, and it was unlikely I would hit those speeds over there. My idea was to bring a small Netgear consumer router and switch so at least I controlled the local network and could host PiHole or any other utilities which might be useful for a coding event.
So, on the Friday, I quickly setup the network on the router, and also setup my Pine64 cluster to run K3s in case anyone wanted to host something or a newbie wished to learn more about Kubernetes. It's a very lightweight cluster, fitting in a micro-ATX case and features 7 compute modules.

Day 1

On Saturday, I finished packing my bags and walked/ran to the metro station to get to Intermart Ebene where I would meet Ish, Privi, and Nathan. We picked up all the essentials we would need for the 2 days, including snacks and beer. Emphasis on beer - it would not be Hacktoberfest without part of Octoberfest, right?
After our shopping spree, we made a quick stop at my office so I could pick up my coffee machine. This was important for those who don't drink alcohol or who intended on coding late into the night.

When we finally got to the bungalow, we were greeted by Bruno, Chittesh, and Aditya in the pool. Nathan, who had dealt with the seller, was given a tour with do's and don'ts and we were finally let into the bungalow. We were already starving at this point, so put Bruno on omelette-making duty while we unpacked the cars and filled the fridge and setup the tech.

Following the amazing quick lunch, we got installed on the table or sofa, laptops open, and got coding. In the weeks leading up to the event, I had shared a spreadsheet where we added projects which we could work on during Hacktoberfest and quite a few were our own projects which we wanted more ~~free labour~~ contributors for.

I was working on KRaft and the accompanying K3k-rs Rust crate, adding some extra layers of polish. I seized the opportunity to show the platform to Cedric and Danshil and drag them onboard as future beta-testers for when KRaft is ready for use.

Everyone was working on one project or another and we were actually quite busy for a while, with music playing through the TV. Admittedly, I do not have much to say about the contributions part as I was working on my laptop :)
A major project which got worked on was the openSUSE lounge for easier member management for the community. Started by Ish, who has a long history in the openSUSE community, it saw contributions from Chittesh, Bruno, Sandeep, and myself that afternoon.

In the evening, code contributions continued intensely, just now with the company of Flying Dodo beer. At one point, Sandeep wanted to transfer a Linux ISO from his Macbook to his Thinkpad over the network. It was finally time for my overkill network setup to shine! I got the two machines connected over ethernet cables and the file transferred in less than a minute over gigabit speeds. So, while my router + switch + cluster setup did not see all that much use, it was worth it for that one minute of pride.

I had mentioned during one of the many discussions on the Hacktoberfest group that I was taking care of dinner, and this was in the form of Khushal, my friend from college, who was coming to make pizzas live for us. My organisation skills had been repeatedly put into question regarding dinner and everyone was intensely awaiting to see what I had conjured. Truly, nobody had faith in me...

Khushal brought all the ingredients, dough, and his pizza oven and cooked everything sur-place. All of a sudden, doubts in my planning skills faded and everyone was eager to watch the pizzas being made. At the same time, I transitioned from organiser to server, getting pizzas to the coders and making sure everyone was fed well enough. And when everyone was truly stuffed, I finally sat down with a whole pizza to myself.

After dinner, contributions continued, albeit a bit slower and with more beer in people's glasses. I finished working on the Docker-related work for the openSUSE lounge and FINALLY made a proper PR. I had been so busy running left and right that I hadn't had the opportunity to properly sit down with code and add a feature to my projects.

Eventually, as the night progressed, tiredness creeped up on more and more people who brought their beer to the terrace and continued on their conversations in the cool night air. I was completely shattered at this point so also joined the crowd and listened in on the stories they had to tell.

My night ended early, at midnight. Just as well or I would have regretted my life choices when waking up the next day.

Day 2

I slept pretty well, with only one interruption when Ish climbed out of bed to sleep on the sofa at 2:30, escaping from the mosquitoes. I then woke up at 6:30 as someone was washing the dishes and the noise echoed up the stairwell. I was tempted to get out of bed and yell down "ki ca nimport ki pe fer la vaisselle enn gran 6h 30 gramatin" though that would have required me to get out of bed in the first place. It turns out that the "nimport" doing the dishes was Ish who was getting in his first contribution of the day!

Later that morning though, we were surprised by a sudden powercut which cut off everything from internet to chargers and even my cell reception dropped. We probably should have checked https://power-outages-mauritius.netlify.app in advance as there was a long maintenance window from 8:30 all the way to 3:30pm! This affected not only us but also traffic lights and businesses which had to wheel out portable generators!

Well, that was tragic. Or, not really...
The bungalow was next to the beach. So after a quick breakfast of more eggs, Nathan, Pritvi and I went out for a walk. The fresh air and quiet morning gave me plenty of time to think up this blogpost, and a thought crossed my mind. I have many friends abroad, particularly in Europe. They have access to better technology, faster internet, and infrequent powercuts. However, despite all this, they do not have the opportunity to walk on the beach after a hackathon. Mauritius stays winning :)

Coming back from the walk, I finished my second PR to openSUSE lounge adding Kubernetes manifests on the little battery power my Thiccpad had left. Then we lazed around on the sofa, eating snacks and reheated pizza and drinking whatever beer was left while people packed their bags and left. The event properly ended with us going for a swim in the pool around noon as we couldn't bear the heat.

Conclusion

Later on, Vidush and Fawaaz joined us. They had been unable to come the day before and were in the North anyway so they could easily pop in. We talked a bit and packed our bags before heading for lunch at La Croisette mall. Finally, Nathan and I were dropped at the metro station and we finally headed home.

I think the recurring theme in this blogpost is both how busy and tired I was, as well as how little code I actually wrote. And while I can definitely bemoan both of those, I got a ton of positive feedback from all the attendees, especially about the pizza. So, all-in-all, it was totally worth it and I am already looking forward to organising similar events in the future. Maybe we'll have a sponsor to help cover costs? wink wink

For comments or discussions, you can find me here!