Yay, DevCon! The go-to event for geeks, nerds and anyone under the IT enthusiast spectrum in Mauritius. A quick pre-face. I attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in March earlier this year and, while that was definitely an experience in of itself, DevCon holds a special place in my heart because of how tightly knit the community is. Well, enough talking, on to the main event!
Day 0
I got to help setup DevCon this year, it was so much fun! Between helping to unload the truckloads of stuff for the sponsor booths, to carrying merch and other "loose" items to the store room, and helping speakers test their laptops' connection to the projector, I was moving around all day long!
In my opinion, 3 days of conference go by way too fast so I really wanted to maximise the time I spent with the cool guys from the MSCC. Oh, and if you still have your badge, there's a chance that I wrote the number on it. (and yes, if you ask politely, i can sign it too /j :P)
Day 1
Sessions Attended
- Panel Discussion: Cloud Native Strategies for Mauritian Businesses (Ish Sookun)
Something unbelievable happened! My mum came to talk at DevCon for the first time in years, and represented a mysterious "local bank" where she uses Kubernetes and other Cloud Native tools for deployments. That aside, it was a very nice conversation about the state of the IT industry in Mauritius, as well as its past and future with the advent of Cloud Native and transition from traditional on-prem servers.
- Quantity over Quality: A Kubernetes Tale (myself)
This talk had nothing super technical or in-depth into Kubernetes. An avant-gout to the workshop the following day. I talked about what Kubernetes is, its advantages, and the ways to exploit the Cloud Native ecosystem to build resilient, highly available, scalable infrastructure to meet the 21st century's demands. It was a fun presentation, and I'm very glad the audience was receptive to my lame jokes. Additionally, I was really happy with the discussions and questions I had with attendees afterwards!
- Kickstart Your Cloud Journey (Jain Ramchurn & Dereck Lam Hon Wah)
Given my involvement in Cloud Native, maybe I should take a lil step back and have a look at plain ol' Cloud. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to Jain and Dereck maybe doing the Kubernetes Resume Challenge, given their involvement with Cloud Native Mauritius recently!
Admittedly, I didn't attend all that many sessions on Thursday. Between helping with the flood of attendees at the registration desk and finishing preparations for the workshop on Friday, I didn't get much time to attend all the talks I had wanted. Sadly, I missed out on the Laravel talk by Avish. Ish has been talking to me so much about Laravel that I will have to give it a try someday soon; so far my main language of choice is Python, coupled with Flask.
Day 2
Day 2 didn't go to plan. To start off the day, my mum was sick and wouldn't be able to make it to DevCon. This meant my ride there was out of the question, and, with the networking hour at the end of the day, I was uncertain about getting back home afterwards (metro services stop at 7pm).
Thankfully, I was able to make arrangements with Neil to share a room at Le Suffren, so I quickly packed my bags with all my clothes and my extra laptop for the Kubernetes workshop I was hosting that day and walked down the road to take the metro. Unsurprisingly, I reached Caudan Arts Centre a bit late and breathless, which did not help with the impending stress of my upcoming workshop.
Sessions Attended
- Secure your WordPress Installation (Nathan Mangar)
After a few lines of last-minute testing, I attended my friend Nathan's talk on securing Wordpress. Did you know 40% of the web is just Wordpress sites? Unfortunately, I had to leave this session early because I just couldn't sit still, and went off to setup my hardware for the workshop. - Kubernetes Workshop (Ish and I)
After a brief setup and an nvidia driver scare on my laptop (pfft, nvidia on Linux) I was up and running. Ish joined me to give an awesome introduction to Cloud Native and the local Cloud Native Chapter, which got approved barely a couple of weeks before DevCon, before leaving the stage to me. I won't go too much into what happened during the workshop itself but, suffice to know there was an ID-10-T issue. I wrote more about what actually went wrong here.
- The workshop-turned-demo showed attendees how to setup the kubectl command line utility to interface with the Kuberetes API, followed by creating pods, services, and deployments. Afterwards, I showed secrets in Kubernetes, in particular docker auth secrets to pull from a private registry. Using my private image, I then showed scaling and how traffic is load balanced internally to hit different pods to best use resources. On the topic of scaling, I introduced resource limits, as well as how to create horizontal pod autoscalers. After showing out helm, the Kubernetes "package manager", I demonstrated installing Longhorn, and how to configure it to make scheduled snapshots or backups, as well as specifying replicas of data for redundancy within the cluster. To top it all off, I would have shown installing Grav CMS utilising everything learnt but, for some reason, the Docker image was missing and time was running short.
- After some rest for my poor throat and legs, I tagged along with Ish and Shelly for lunch. Unfortunately, I was too kaput to attend a talk I had really wanted to go to: Celery Served Fresh, by Kherin but luckily, he pardoned me for my transgression and told me he'd send the slides and a recording afterwards.
- SUSE Bootcamp Part 2 (Dawid van der Merwe)
After lunch, I attended the second part of Dawid's talk on SUSE's enterprise solutions. I didn't attend the first mainly because it was covering Rancher Prime, which was technology I had already seen and played with hands-on at Rancher Day at KubeCon earlier this year. - Linux for the Cloud Native Practitioner (Ish)
A bit of winding down for the day, I thoroughly enjoyed Ish's talk on Linux for the Windows person. Being part of the daily-drive-Linux squad, there wasn't much new for me, but I nonetheless enjoyed Ish's interactions with the audience, framing the session more as a friendly chat than an oh-so-formal presentation.
Day 3
Sessions Attended
- Achieving Zero Downtime in Banking Applications (Chervine Bhiwoo)
If you saw the title and thought "hmm, kubernetes?", you'd be right! This was a really cool talk by Chervine about how MCB built their Kubernetes solutions in-house on top of Red Hat's OpenShift, allowing them to deploy updates to their services at 9/10 am, when millions of transactions are being made, without so much as a second of downtime. - Business Critical Linux (Dawid van der Merwe)
A lot of focus for developers is... well... the development side of things. However, how can you be confident in the reliability of your application if it's built on a foundation of loose soil? Here comes SUSE's enterprise-grade Linux coming in several flavours tailored to your specific use cases, to provide the robust foundation that your business needs. - The Rise of the Gamer (Loic Forget & Cedric Sookahet)
A fun discussion about the history of gaming, as well as the current state of gaming in Mauritius. I definitely share Cedric's views on the high latency situation we gamers have here. I wonder how resource intensive a local CS2 server would be... Hmm, a potential project idea. That aside, I enjoyed seeing their individual history as well as what games were the most memorable to them. - Securing MariaDB (Girish Mahabir)
This session was really cool and nicely paced. Girish elaborated on all the security techniques which can be used to keep your data secure and framed it in a "see, it's that easy to do it" way. - Lightning Talks (By Sandeep Ramgolam; I talked)
The Lightning Talks are always a fun part of DevCon for me, and they are a staple of the last day. The lineup:
- Chervine Bhiwoo - "Death by SMS"
- Houzair Koussa - "Easter eggs in tech"
- Abdallah Yashir Ramsing - AI Innovations in Video Editing
- Alexandre Bissessur - "Reviving old tech with the Pi Pico"
- Dereck - "The git diffing algorithm"
- Jain Ramchurn - 3 terminal tools to make your life easier
- Sandeep Ramgolam - "Learn by building"
I had the opportunity to talk about my experience converting a retro Apple joystick to be compatible with modern devices and operating systems by first using an Arduino through a highly complicated setup, then by simplifying the whole thing with a Raspberry Pi Pico and Python!
Networking Hour
Compared to last year, the Networking Hour (NH) was on invite-only This is understandable because, for better or worse, DevCon has reached numbers previously only dreamt of, and the cost to fund a NH for all these attendees (even, say, 400) is staggering! This meant that the NH was pretty much reserved for speakers, squad, and organisers.
I had a lot of fun this year, especially since most of my time wasn't spent in queues for food haha. I had a nice walk around at the start, meeting my friends and getting to know their friends in turn. However, the tiredness of the day was starting to catch up so, after the food was served, I took my plate and went to sit outside on the grass with a few others, including Sandeep and Neil. It was very nice to sit down, my feet and legs were in a world of pain.
As the night progressed, more and more tired people joined us outside, and the circle kept growing. The Networking Hour ended on the more senior members of the community recounting stories from a long time ago, back when I wasn't even in tech, of communities long gone, surviving only through the memories and tales told.
As quite a few of the organisers had not yet eaten, having stayed at the entrance to check people in, we had a late-night excursion to the Caudan waterfront where we bought some pizza from Pizza Hut, minutes before they were closing for the night. We brought it back and ate it under the light of our phones in the garden outside JoKi/MJ's room. It wasn't great but it was the company that mattered!
Following that, The Guys I was tagging along with decided they had not drunk enough that night, so wanted to make a detour by the bar before heading off to bed. Of course, I accompanied them. I drank a cider, and we stuck around the bar till around midnight, when the music and disco lights came to a halt. I had a thought around this time: barely 1.5 years ago, I looked up to the people I was with as role models, kinda like celebrities. And here I was, having a drink with those same people who I now call my friends!
