The Developers Conference 2016 kicked off today with a keynote address by Jochen Kirstätter. I reached Voilà Hotel just a few minutes late, didn’t miss much of the opening ceremony. Jochen was still talking about the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. He made the usual distinction of why «software craftsman» as he went on explaining that one needs to keep on practicing one’s skills, refining them just as a carpenter would do with woodwork.

Jochen spoke about celebrating three years of the MSCC and the two hundred meetups organized; mainly Code & Coffee sessions. He then mentioned the creation of Agile Media Ltd, a private company to give a «legal form» to MSCC. I’m sure more would be popping up in the coming meetups. Aww! There was also mention of a .mu domain for MSCC that could be happening soon. No ETA announced though.

There was a networking break and we were back for a session on «user groups in Mauritius».

Folks from the PHP Mauritius User Group talked about their passion. Wasseem and Nadheer related their experience/adventure on how they met the «don» of the PHP world.

Logan and Selven from hackers.mu talked about their passion for hacking. Selven, co-founder of the group, gave an introduction and highlighted aims of the group; which is to provide code/patches upstream in Open Source projects and make Mauritius known in the FOSS world.

The hackers.mu team at the Developers Conference 2016

I was next to speak about the Linux User Group of Mauritius, the community and why be there. I had no slides but just a quick story to relate why I am in the group and if that could motivate someone to join the group and spread «Linux love» then I’ll assume «mission accomplished».

Ajmal Dookhan, a passionate fellow, whom I also met during the WTISD 2016, recorded a few seconds from my LUGM experience. Thanks buddy. :D

The lunch time is another moment for networking. Ajmal, Pritvi, Akasha, Yash and I headed to Panarottis. The geek chat continued there for like an hour and we rushed back to attend other presentations. I met the LSL Digital team who just had a pizza lunch too.

I attended a «jumpstart session on PHP» presented by Pierre-Alexandre.

Pierre-Alexandre went through the thinking process & planning of a simple personal blog written in PHP. In his next two sessions on Saturday and Sunday, he surely will dive deeper in the code.

Developers Conference is also time to meet up old friends. Shared some more geek time with my ex-colleagues and distributed some openSUSE stickers.

I went to Bagatelle Mall, grabbed a coffee from Vida-e-Cafe, while talking to friends and we came back for the last presentation of the day; which was on AngularJS 2, presented by Yashin.

I reached home at 18h45, exhausted but happy after a wonderful day.