Timeline

I hate Linkedin. Here's my private feed, ordered from most to least recent. Want a search feature? You got it, it's called CTRL + F

[6/12/2025] Cloud Native Mauritius December Meetup

I'm very happy that, on the short notice of only a week, we were able to organise a casual meetup at Kuumba Coffee in Telfair. We were around 10 to attend the event, with 2 joining remotely. We shared slides over Google Meet, and used out laptops and phones to join the "meeting", which also allowed us to run the event hybrid, which was very cool.
I presented on my project KRaft which promises a portable cloud service platform which can be installed anywhere. I also had the chance to talk about the possibility of installing my Proliant in a rack somewhere to run KRaft as a small local cloud.
Zain then took the floor to discuss the erosion of privacy by the "child protection" proposals for ID checks, VPN bans, and such. It spawned an interesting discussion over abuse of power, and whether such a proposal (which is valid, to prevent children from being on socials) can then be weaponised to oppress and silence the people, should another Missier Moustass occur.
Zain's talk can be found in blogpost form here: jain.rs/mauritius/icta-telecommunication-directive-4/

[22/11/2025] FrontendMU Beach Meetup

For the third consecutive year, I gave a talk at the Frontend MU beach meetup, talking about Kubernetes. As usual, I gave a brief overview of containers and Kubernetes, before deploying their website on my homelab. I had wanted to do a bit more with my "CSP" KRaft, but the talks had started late and everyone was already a bit tired. I had a lot of fun talking Kubernetes with the frontend people and look forward to next year!

[27/10/2025] Hacktoberfest Complete

For the first time ever, I completed Hacktoberfest and hit the supercontributor title with 6 accepted PRs for Hacktoberfest-tagged topics. I am thrilled to have not only completed my contributions but helped mentor other participants both during the Cloud Native Hacktoberfest event and over Github. Something of note - I actually got a PR to one of my repos from someone else. A PR which was full of disappointment and disgust as it was 200 lines of poorly written Rust.
Either way, I'm happy to have completed Hacktoberfest and gotten involved with the community this year round!

[11/10/2024] Cloud Native Hacktoberfest

For the longest time, I wanted to host an event in a bungalow near the beach, and get a bunch of friends from the community together to work on tech stuff. Hacktoberfest gave us the perfect chance, and I am incredibly happy to have organised and run the event which saw some 10 participants getting together and working on a ton of different projects. The whole thing is way too long for me to get into here, so I would recommend you check my longer, albeit informal blogpost here: https://alexbissessur.dev/cloud-native-hacktoberfest-2025/!

[27/09/2025] Programmers Day

Mauritius has, quite possibly, the most communities and community events per capita than any other country in the world. I often complain about a lack of Saturdays with clashes between community groups. Programmers Day was an event organised by Mervyn to show off the diversity of the Mauritian tech community and introduce attendees to all the community groups active here.
Throughout the day, 12 different community groups took the stage to present their technologies, their drive, what they do, and why you should join them. Among these groups, Ish and I showed off Cloud Native Mauritius where we try to indoctrinate people (with much success) to the world of Linux and Cloud Native. I also featured in the background as tech support when Ish was presenting on the openSUSE community which makes Mauritius into a beacon in the global openSUSE community.

[09/08/2025] MSCC Meetup - Old Man Yells at Clouds

It's not often that I talk at MSCC meetups. But when I do, it's undoubtedly about something political. The theme for the day was AI, or rather LLMs, and I wanted to spice things up with a talk about why AI is bad. I had the joy of going first, setting the tone for the rest of the day (much to the chagrin, I assume, of the following speakers).
My presentation covered catastrophic hallucinations, the illusion of faster development, environmental concerns, ethical concerns, fascism, and the impact AI will have on falsifying the reality we live in.
It was an awesome presentation littered with jokes and humour, often at the AI's expense, and I am happy to have had meaningful discussions afterwards.

[24-26/07/2025] Developers Conference 2025

With DevCon at an end, I am super happy to have participated yet again this year, giving a talk about Harvester virtualisation. On top of that, I helped out with the MSCC squad to register attendees and facilitate the process of getting their badges. It was an awesome experience, as always, and I'm happy to have helped out throughout the conference.
I'll keep it short! Here's a much longer write-up of the event!

[26-28/06/2025] openSUSE Conference

I'm thrilled that I got the chance to not only fly over to Germany and attend oSC, but also to give not one, but TWO talks on an international stage! Together with my colleagues Ish and Eddy, we represented Mauritius and the significant involvement our small island has in the openSUSE community!
I first presented on my geographically distributed cluster project, similar to Rejekts. For the second talk, I introduced Harvester and Longhorn, which are FOSS Cloud-Native-oriented technologies to run VMs on Kubernetes. This is specifically relevant due to the push for digital sovereignty and being able to properly trust your infrastructure, rather than relying on the gradually less stable and predictable USA. I mean, who wants their virtualisation stack to get slapped with tarrifs?

Other than that, I'm super happy to have met so many awesome people! oSC and, overall, my trip to Germany was incredible. Looking forward to next year!

[21/06/2025] Cloud Native Meetup

In not too long (tomorrow) I am flying off to Nuremberg for the openSUSE conference! However, before that, we need to have a CNMU meetup! Today was a casual get-together of some 10 people at Kuumba coffee in Telfair (becoming a favourite for meetups) and with a lot of new faces. One of them was our speaker, Orhun, who is also one of the main faces behind Ratatui - the CLI library for Rust projects. He showed us some incredible projects built with Rust and Ratatui, some of which you can use to manage your Kubernetes cluster and deployments.
We also spent a lot of time introducing new attendees to the community and its history and involvement with Cloud technologies, as well as Linux. After a quick lunch there, we headed back home where Ish and I had suitcases to prepare.

[14/06/2025] MSCC Meetup: Testing

There were three talks lined up for the meetup today. While the other two were from experienced testers who have experience from the development world, I (sysadmin) took a very different approach. Testing is so complicated. It involves half a million tools and software suites, most of which cost a fortune. For my presentation, I talked about testing in production (responsibly of course) and how you can leverage new technologies from the Cloud Native landscape (particularly Kubernetes) to make resilient infrastructure, allowing you to properly test in production without affecting users, angering your CEO, and getting fired.
I also did this presentation from my 2010 MacBook Pro which I had recovered from the trash pile at work and which now runs Arch Linux btw.

[24/05/2025] Cloud Native Mauritius May Meetup

Every so often we organise a beginner-friendly meetup to onboard all the new Kubernetes enthusiasts we have indoctrinated. It started with Ish giving an introduction to the terms commonly found when discussing Kubernetes - deployments, pods, services, ingress etc. I went next talking about my "weekend" project, meetup.mu which aggregates meetups from different communities, and hosts RSVPs. It runs on my Kubernetes homelab and was a story revolving around the words "but I was too lazy for X". Two people from OceanDBA (our host for the day) went after lunch, talking about what they learnt about Kubernetes and running MariaDB through their Kubernetes operator. And finally, SM gave a rant about IPv6 issues with Cloudflare and Google. It was a really fun meetup, with some 18 attendees!

[25/04/2025] Cloud Native MU x NUGM

For the April meetup, NUGM (.NET User Group Mauritius) approached us for a collaborative meetup and we were happy to join forces. It gave the Cloud Native people a reason to learn the whole .NET ecosystem (which revolves around Windows). I won't lie, the intersection between .NET and Cloud Native is very slim, and it was really cool to see the speakers really make an effort in bridging the gap!

Image taken on 3 April 2025

[03-04/2025] KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, with Rejekts

Something too much for a short post here, I flew all the way to London this year to attend KubeCon. Something particularly cool about this year's KubeCon is that my talk got rejected and subsequently accepted to Rejekts. It was an amazing trip, and I had to break it into a couple of separate blogposts. Here's one on Rejekts. And here's one on my experience at Kubecon and in London!

[24/03/2025] I am now KCNA certified

I bought the KCNA while it was on sale last year for Black Friday. I figured, ahead of KubeCon, I would at least get one CNCF credential to my name. The KCNA is Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate certificate and it is an entry-level certificate for anyone entering the world of Cloud Native. Given I've been homelabbing for ages, this was a breeze.

[22/03/2025] Cloud Native Mauritius March Meetup

Our March meetup was planned at Acensi, in Moka. However, due to awful weather and some other logistical issues, we made the last-minute decision to go to a nearby cafe in Telfair called Kuumba. It was a really fun meetup, with slides shared online, and attendees, sat around a table, shared their laptop screens. Definitely one of the most fun meetups we have organised so far! I also gave a talk on Talos Linux, the Linux distribution made for one thing, and one thing only: Kubernetes.
Read more about the meetup here!

[21/02/2025] Cloud Native Mauritius Casual Meetup

We had a fun "old-school" meetup with some 8 people from Cloud Native Mauritius. Was a lot of fun without a formal structure or sponsor, and all the emails being thrown around to organise venues. It was held at Flying Dodo as from 6:30. I had a lot of nice conversations about cloud native stuff, and the tech community in general.

[18/02/2025] Safer Internet Day @ CSE

I'm honoured to have been invited back to my college to talk on staying safe online. I'm happy to have met Avinash Meetoo as well, who spoke on VPNs, and firewalls, and how they keep you safe.
I talked about how everyone is out to get your personal data, your digital profile, and how it's used for nefarious purposes. Between Windows and Android spying on you, to Google keeping your browsing data, and your ISP likely tracking your browsing history, is it even possible to stay safe online?

Image

[08/02/2025] MSCC Meetup - Open Source Hacking Tools

Shelly contacted me on the eve, as one of the speakers had dropped out for medical reasons, asking if I could fill in. Naturally, I was more than happy to talk about cool hacking tools like the Flipper Zero which have made hacking accessible to more people, with the only boundary being $200.
However, my talk then pivoted to open source/hardware hacking tools, such as the T-Embed CC1101 which is built using off-the-shelf hardware and for which the firmware is found over on GitHub.
Are you or your organisation safe from these nifty little devices?

[30/11/2024] Frontend Meetup At The Beach, Featuring Kubernetes

I had the pleasure of continuing the tradition of hosting the Frontend.mu website on my Kubernetes cluster running at home. Through a VPN, I accessed my cluster, and walked these frontend people through the "complicated" yaml files, and the mystery of containers. Along the way, I had the opportunity to show everyone some real time troubleshooting with `kubectl log` and `describe`.
Very fun opportunity, I'm looking forward to doing it again next year!

[12/10/2024] MSCC Meetup - Open Source

I made arguments on "owning your data" at the MSCC meetup hosted by Astek. Between unethical AI, overzealous monopolies, and incessant corporate greed, you may be better off self-hosting and controlling your data rather than handing it off to some other conglomerate under a EULA you didn't read.

Is Kubernetes Straightforward? I try to answer that question.

[31/08/2024] Cloud Native Meetup - First Steps

I had the pleasure, alongside Ish, to organise the very first meetup of the local Cloud Native chapter! Hosted at Swan, my employers at the time, this meetup went from Docker to Cloud Deployments in the context of Cloud Native.

You can read more about this awesome first meetup here!

[18-20/07/2024] DevCon 2024

DevCon is my favourite event of the year, and there's more to say about it than I can fit as a post here. This year, I was part of the Squad, helped throughout the conference, and presented a total of 3 times, in one lightning talk, one presentation, and a workshop!
The full story is here!

[05/2024 - 09/2024] Internship @ SWAN in Software Development

Between Python, C# + .NET, ReactJS, and more, I am over the moon at having spend around 5 months at SWAN. Despite not considering myself a "developer" and more a Devops/Sysadmin person, it was an unforgettable experience and I can't express how much I appreciate the amazing team I got to work with.
Thank you Daven, as well as Ludmilla and Hans. Swan wouldn't have been the same without you 😊

Wow my hair was so short.

[19/03/2024] KubeCon EU

Through a series of very unexpected coincidences, I was able to fly all the way to Paris for KubeCon & CloudNativeCon EU! It was an amazing experience bigger than anything I had experienced before, and I got to meet a lot of amazing people and learn a lot of really cool things about the world of Cloud Native. You can read about my KubeCon experience in full over here!

[24/11/23] Frontend Meetup Beach Edition

This was the first Frontend meetup I had the pleasure to be invited to. Thanks a lot Sandeep for trusting in me to make a decent presentation about Kubernetes for the Frontend people. While bridging the chasm between my world and that of these people, I showed off some cool features which make K8S interesting to developers, and the topped it off by ssh-ing to my homelab, through a VPN, and deploying the frontend.mu website on my K3S cluster of SBCs.

[10-11/23] HSC/A Level Exams

I'm just adding this for completeness. In October/November 2024, I finally sat for my HSC/A Level exams. The subjects I had chosen were Maths, Physics, Computer Science as main, with GP and Biology as subsidiary.
I'm thrilled to say that I managed extraordinarily, especially considering all the stuff I did during my last year, including but not limited to skipping classes to work on slides and personal projects. With A* in Maths, A in Physics, and A* in CS, with a in both GP and Biology, I also scored the 176th place out of all students in all categories (science, business, art) in all of Mauritius.

[20/07/2023] DevCon 2023

This was possibly the most significant DevCon for me. It was the first time I presented, talking about Kubernetes, and more specifically Kubernetes on Single Board Computers. I attended this DevCon during the second term holidays of my HSC year at school, and I'm glad to have attended, as I got the opportunity to meet a lot of my friends, and make new ones.