So many conferences, it's been a very busy year! Thankfully, the events are dying down and I can get some rest (and my bank account can recover)! Developer's Conference, the biggest annual tech event in Mauritius, spanning 3 days and covering a thousand different topics, has just ended.
Compared to previous years, DevCon 2025 had downscaled quite a bit, returning to its roots at Voila hotel at Bagatelle, a contrast to the much larger venue of previous years: Caudan Arts Center.
Day 1
For the first day, I was brought to Voila by my mum (also Squad) fairly early in the morning. As Squad, we were to help out with checking people in and getting them their badges. I stuck around at the registration desk for a bit then headed off to the opening ceremony by Jochen and Ish.
Sessions Attended
- AI – Framing the Problem, by Sujit. Sujit, the "head of IT" at Swan gave an interesting keynote about the AI strategies being deployed to automate processes and take care of the manual work which devs often lament about. A very bold claim he made was that "there is an AI tool to do every task" and while I disagree, I am interested to see how it will change the way Swan's IT department functions.
- Panel Discussion – How much cybersecurity is enough, by Ish. It was definitely interesting to see that "cybersecurity second" is a nearly global phenomenon, with security taking the backseat to fast development.
The discussion followed industry trends for what is "enough" cybersecurity - it tends to be the cheapest solution possible while covering the bottoms of the executives/board. We also got to hear about funny failures, including Cert.mu's non-functional mailing list. A more concerning failure is the lax security on ISP-provided routers.
In recent news, an app called Tea got "hacked", revealing thousands of users' identifiable information including IDs, passports, drivers licenses and more. So the question really is, when will we approach tech in a "security-first" frame of mind? - AI-Powered Linux Administration, by Samuel Arogbonlo. I attended out of morbid curiosity to see how AI gets shoehorned into domains where I think it does not belong. The talk itself revolved around using LLMs to diagnose and troubleshoot issues within a Kubernetes cluster - things like insufficient cache causing high response times.
I couldn't get past the fact that recently, a Replit LLM "agent" deleted a startup's entire production database. And Gemini deleted another person's project files.
- Top 5 techniques for building the worst microservice system ever, by William Brander. I recently converted a website at work to use microservices. Why? As proof that it is feasible without the website imploding. William gave a fascinating and insanely humorous talk on how not to make a microservices architecture. And admittedly, I only scored 1/5 on the bad-practice-o-meter, but now I know how to avoid them all.
That was it for the first day of sessions. However, that did not mean the fun was over – the networking hour was due to start around 5:30, sponsored by Spoon Consulting. I had the opportunity to talk to a bunch of people and catch up with those who I have not seen since last DevCon.
Day 2
After a long night in the companionship of Flying Dodo beer and Japanese whiskey and all-too-drunk friends, I woke up for Day 2 in the comfort of my room at Voila (yes, I spent the night at Voila specifically so I could drink more). I will admit, however, that I did not sleep enough.
Sessions Attended
- What's New for Developers, by Atieno Allela. Atieno, from Google, gave a massive overview on Google's AI technologies in a humorous presentation, showing off how they work, what each AI platform specialises in, and how you can build an app from a couple plain English sentences. I do not like designing UIs and some of the models could actually let me skip the painful parts and actually do the development parts I like.
Though... I do like writing plain html + css once in a while. - Exploring the openSUSE Project, by Ish Sookun. After attending oSC last month, Ish just had to have a talk to indoctrinate the locals with the openSUSE gospel. He talked about how you can get involved in the openSUSE project through very "stupid" means - such as by running after a gecko in your garden, taking a picture, and sending it off to be the wallpaper for openSUSE Leap 16. Or even stupider, by simply packaging a program through OBS.
Either way, you should join the vibrant local openSUSE community!!
My Session
Harvester: The Solution To Your Virtualisation Needs. I like saying that containerisation is the future of infrastructure. Nonetheless, you probably run VMs, and you possibly run them on a very expensive virtualisation platform. My talk presented Harvester, a stack of open source technologies bundled together, and how it combines storage, networking, and compute together in what is called HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI). I then gave a demo on the production Harvester cluster at work. And, you know, given that there were no prod outages, I think my demo went well :)
And to wrap up the day, there was the speaker dinner. This was a very nice addition to DevCon which was absent in the previous editions hosted at Caudan Arts. The food and ambiance was very nice and the pumpkin soup was easily one of the best items on the menu (I had 3 portions). In the middle of the dinner, there was a bit of a dramatic disruption and, yknow, nothing makes a dinner more lively than some drama. After the dinner, we stuck around with more drinks (i had no alcohol btw*) and I went to bed early.
* for clarification, I had no alcohol because I previously had a headache and took a panadol. My great friends didn't want me to risk a panadol x alcohol concoction.
Day 3
Other than the keynote from Joe van der Walt on AI and MCPs, I didn't attend any sessions on Saturday. I helped out on the registration booth, checking in the people who hadn't been able to attend during the week. I also met a couple friends who I hadn't seen in a long time and it was nice to catch up with them.
Closing Ceremony
And that was DevCon! During the closing ceremony, it was revealed that we had 714 attendees, which is an impressive number for the smaller and less accessible (no metro line) venue. The theme for next year was revealed: football – more specifically the world cup, timing with the real-world event which should be held in the US next year. I was also surprised at the mention of my project meetup.mu as a go-to for anyone looking for community events year-round.
