The first developers conference took place in Mauritius on the 23 to 25 April 2015. I attended all 3 days and really enjoyed the conference. I believe that there’s no other place I could have learnt so much and meet so much like-minded people as DevCon in Mauritius.
What was really cool was the mix of IT pros, business owners and students and all coming from different backgrounds such as Database experts, Open-Source advocates, Microsoft Enthusiasts, Web Developers, lecturers and much more just to share their passion and learn.
Day 1
As I arrived, I was given this beautiful presenter badge below. When I entered the conference room, the keynote had completed and Joki was giving an introduction of the MSCC.
Meet MSCC
Joki gave an introduction of the MSCC and discussed some of the past events organised.
Google Developer Group
Just as Joki’s presentation completed, I immediately went downstairs to checkout yannick’s presentation on Google Developer Group. I had absolutely no idea what this was and was quite intrigued about this.
It was good to learn that Google Developer Groups (GDGs) are for developers who are interested in Google’s developer technology; everything from the Android, Chrome, Drive, and Google Cloud platforms, to product APIs like the Cast API, Maps API, and YouTube API. And GDG Mauritius is currently being set-up in Mauritius
Mauritius Internet Users Group
Next on, was an introduction of the Mauritius Internet Users Group by SM, Ish and Shelly.
They showcased the stuffs they are currently working on and their objectives. This was a very interactive and fun presentation. They also presented several security flaws in Mauritian Web Sites.
Azure Machine Learning and Azure DocumentDB
Just after that I took a quick lunch break before starting to prepare myself for my 2 presentations.
I had 2 presentations of 1 hour each on Azure Machine Learning and Azure DocumentDB respectively.
Everything went on as expected and I’m also very happy of the mixed audience which consisted of some start-up owners, IT pros, lecturers (2 of my previous lecturers) and students who very very interactive with lots of questions, feedback and comments. 🙂
Flask!!
Even though I was tired after a 2 hour presentation, I attended the session on Flask by Avinash, as I heard lots about it recently.
Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.
Despite being from a Microsoft background and working mostly with ASP.NET and C#, I was happy to see that open-source tools like Flask has many has many things in common (logic and structure) like the tools I work on a daily basis which I easily understood.
I found Flask very powerful and easy to work with, definitely gonna try this when I have some time.
Day 2
On day 2 I attended only 3 presentations and spent the rest of the time network and hangout with friends.
AngularJS
I arrived just in time to attend the session on AngularJS by Joki. This was a nice little introduction and even here I found many similar concepts between open source and non open-source technologies. The session went on well, and I found it really easy to work with. At the end I felt kind-of “thirsty” about it and really wanted to see more. Sad that this was a beginner session.
Here is another technology that I’ll give a try.
The Database can do much more than you can imagine
While most of us are doing lots of Select/Insert/update/Delete in the database on a daily basis, Jean-Marc showcased some really database optimization, ways of making the database make web service calls, making the database scrap web pages, sending mails directly from the database and lots of really great stuff one could not imagine doing at a database level. Jean-Marc also gave some real live examples where such features could be implemented.
Galera Cluster – Theory and Hands-On
The last session I attended was about MariaDB Galera Cluster, a very technical presentation about how galera handles replication on different clusters. Joffrey explained about all the different possibilities of failure and recovery that could happen before doing a live demo at the end! That was great! )
