And with DevCon over, that's half of the year down, and I can finally start getting some rest and working on my projects! Here we go for yet another blogpost about DevCon, the local developer's conference which spans across three days, with three tracks, and brings together tech enthusiasts and professionals from all across the island for talks, workshops, and panel discussions.
I cannot think of anything super interesting which happened running up to the event. I finished the slides for my first presentation a week before, and completed the second on the eve, at midnight, as is tradition.
Day 1
For DevCon, both my mum and I are part of the Squad team - the volunteers who help run the event, be it from the registration desk, directing attendees to the conference rooms, or assisting speakers with technical difficulties. Unfortunately, this meant waking up early to get to the venue for 8am.
The way we check-in attendees is by either scanning a QR code sent to their email address or typing out their name and marking them as being here. Then we direct them to the check-in desk for them to pick up a badge. I helped with checking people in this year.
However, because of bad (nonexistent) testing practices, the QR code didn't work at all. Being the world's most "meh" developer, I took it upon myself to try and fix the QR codes, and pushed to main like a badass. Except then I knocked out the entire check-in process and had to push yet another hotfix to main. Followed by another hotfix. We ended up settling on manual check-in...
Sessions Attended
Since I was really busy with breaking production and checking people in in the morning, I didn't get the chance to really attend that many sessions till the afternoon.
- The Safe and Fast Future of Programming: Introducing Rust – Oh wait, that's my own talk! I talked about Rust basics for 45 minutes, and hopefully converted some people to evolving into rustaceans as well. More on my session below.
- Essential Linux Skills for GCP, by Ish – I consider myself fairly knowledgeable of the Linux world, but I still wanted to attend Ish's talk. It was a fun presentation, which I feel was really targeted towards people in the audience who were not yet familiar with the Linux ecosystem and the sort of "sysadmin" approach to installing, managing, and securing Linux servers. Lastly, it included certain special GCP features such as IAM
My Session
My session about Rust was a ton of fun and I had a fairly large and diverse audience - there were sysadmins, backend developers, and even people whose only language was Javascript (frontend devs). I spent the first few slides complaining about modern software inefficiencies, as one does. My focus was on all the awfully inefficient code and frameworks which have become standard nowadays. Chromium, and by extension, Electron, is one big problem, though the sloppy approach to software also includes things like NodeJS on the backend.
The next few slides introduced Rust, a fairly modern language which has gathered a reputation for being the "i use arch btw" of programming languages. I covered some interesting facts about Rust, and some features of the language which set it apart from languages such as Python, JS, Go, and C (borrow checker, helpful compiler, no garbage collector, etc). Since I feared I was going to lose the audience behind all these theoretical details, I swapped to my terminal to write some actual code and actually show the errors at compile time. After an attempt at explaining the concept of ownership and borrowing, which went less-than-smoothly, I finally got to the core part of my talk - the web.
Rust has a habit of appearing as a scary language used solely for the arcane magic of embedded systems or the internals of gigantic systems like Amazon S3 or Cloudflare. That does not have to be the case. This part of the talk revealed just how easy it is to get started with web development using Rust instead of something like PHP or NodeJS. While you do have micro frameworks such as Axum, Actix-web, Rocket, and the like, those still require a lot of manual assembly. Instead, I introduced Cot, a web framework which resembles Laravel, Rails, and Django, which sports a batteries-included style. While I had wanted to write a Cot application live, from scratch, time was running out, so I demoed my rewrite of meetup.mu in Cot, and how simple it is to get started.
I recorded the talk, though I have yet to actually edit it. Maybe I'll get to doing that this week if I have the motivation to fight Kden Live.
Day 2
Much like last year, I spent the night at Voila hotel so I could just roll out of bed and get to work at the registration desk. And also so I could extend the conference days way past 5pm. Did you know that pizza at 1am just hits different?
Sessions Attended
Since I didn't have a session of my own to work around on Friday, and with there being fewer attendees to check-in, I was a bit more free to attend interesting talks.
- Disaster Stories. A Tale By DevOps, by Medhavi Pareanen and Madhav Ramdin. Just from the title, I knew I had to attend this talk, and I wasn't disappointed. It was an entertaining session about common ways devops and infra teams, paired with awful communication and accountability with dev and QA teams, could lead to severe outages which give everyone involved extra gray hairs. From fragile pipelines, claims of "it works on my machine" and unauthenticated test environments using production data, it was a really engaging session.
- Panel Discussion: Sovereign by Design: Building Africa's Data, Cloud and AI Future, led by Ish. If you know me, you know I have very strong opinions on digital sovereignty and Mauritius's place in a digital world in political turmoil. I wasn't able to stay for the full two hours, but I nonetheless enjoyed hearing the panelists discuss ways for Mauritian companies to be local-first rather than lining up to hand everything over to foreign companies and tech conglomerates.
- .NET Blazor: Building static sites (without SSR), by Vidush. I am not a .NET person by any means, but Vidush is a good and very funny speaker, and it was an enjoyable session about how he built his own Wordpress-lite to cater for smaller local businesses which want an online presence.
Speaker Dinner
The day ended with the speaker dinner: a special evening for speakers, squad, and organisers to get together and socialise after 2 day of conference. It was a nice time to catch up with friends who I see rarely and to get news of fresh drama at their workplaces. After the dinner, I stuck around with other friends who were staying the night to keep the conversation going till the early hours of the morning.
Day 3
A pro tip I can hand out for free is that getting 4 hours of sleep isn't enough for a whole day of conference. It being worth it, though, is another question entirely. Saturday had the "infra" track, with several talks lined up on similar topics. I also had my second talk of the conference in the afternoon
Sessions Attended
- A Declarative Approach to Building Scalable Applications, by Wayne Gakuo. I had the chance to talk to Wayne during the speaker dinner on the eve, and despite not being much of a developer, let alone a JS one, I was still curious about what he was going to talk about. I got a good lesson on clean, maintainable code, and got called out a bit on bad coding practices which turn code into a spaghetti mess which makes you regret ever getting involved in.
- How (And Why) To Build a Cloud Service Provider From Scratch, by me! I have been working on a small project for the better part of a year, to run a cloud-native cloud service provider from my small homelab which used to run in the living room. More on my talk further below.
- Ansible Without the Anxiety: Automation That Actually Works for Developers, by Clifford. I do know my way around Ansible; heck my first homelab was setup entirely with Ansible in a playbook I had stolen from Jeff Geerling's Raspberry Pi series. However, watching Clifford show off Ansible was still very interesting and I learnt a few useful things. Unfortunately I had to pop out before the end of his talk to coordinate with Vidush over the panel which was coming right after, so wasn't able to (jokingly) ask why use Ansible when a little Bash does the job.
- Campsite Fire Chat, moderated by Vidush. The last session of the day, and my third (and fortunately last) time on the opposite side of the audience. During this panel, we were talking about the different approaches to employment in the tech field, with the panel made up of the traditionally employed, self employed, and those who transitioned between them before settling on either. Rumour has it that I was brought onto the panel only because Vidush wanted a token young person to give their perspective on how awful the tech market has become...
My Session
If you have been following me on socials, you will probably know about KRaft, a project I have been working on for the better part of a year. It was born out of a need to run workshops for the local cloud native community easily and without burning a hole in my pocket from cloud costs.
The presentation started with yet another bout of me complaining - complaining about a lack of cloud infrastructure, complaining about our poor connectivity to the rest of the world, and complaining about local cloud service providers. It was a lot of complaining, but they were all issues which everyone in the room has experienced at one point or another, be it when ATMs stopped working because of broken undersea cables, or when they want to host a hobby project on a local server.
The timing was perfect because right after the slander, someone from Mauritius Telecom walked in.
The next stage of the presentation was about my thought process when building my own cloud provider. For example, why I chose containers over virtual machines, and leveraging the vast cloud native ecosystem to make something which will run as well on my small homelab as it would on enterprise gear at scale, without vendor lock-in. I showed off the cloud native landscape as we did have a good number of people in the room who were unfamiliar with the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Then, I showed off the UI and features of KRaft (what i named my cloud platform), before finishing on security features and how I keep your workloads safe while running on shared infrastructure.
I have already edited the video recording for this talk, which you are able to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmj2yILWE3Y. I strongly recommend it since the atmosphere and interactions I had throughout the presentation is very difficult to convey here.
Closing Ceremony
And with that, DevCon was finally over! Just as well too because I was struggling to keep my eyes open during the panel at the end. The closing ceremony took place right after, with the quizzes and statistics for this year's edition. Similar to last year, we had around 700 attendees which is a respectable number for Voila as venue. The theme for next year was also revealed: cyberpunk!! A particularly cool detail is that I will be making the website for then, which will be hosted on conference.mscc.mu. I'm looking forward to it :)