Twenty teams, which is the maximum limit, registered for the WebCup Mauritius challenge this year. It was organized, traditionnally, in the conference hall of the Cyber Tower I in Ebène, on (Saturday & Sunday) 5^th and 6^th of May 2018.

About WebCup

WebCup is an annual web development competition organized simultaneously in the following countries:

• Burkina Faso
• Comoros
• Madagascar
• Mauritius
• Mayotte
• Réunion
• Rodrigues
• Seychelles

At the end of the year each country’s winning team then competes at international level for the WebCup final.

WebCup teams are composed of one to four members and they can compete through the following categories for the same set of prizes:

• Étudiant (students representing their school/university)
• Pour le fun (individuals with no corporate affiliation, not representing any company)
• Pro (professionals representing a company or their employer)

Challenge

The teams have 24 hours to create a website according to a theme that is revealed minutes before the competition.

The challenge this year, however, was that the teams were given only 1 minute to impress the jury panel with a team introduction & individual talents. They had 3 minutes in a questions & answers round to convince the panel about their good work.

I spoke to Zakiya, the organizer, and she explained that last year they noticed that the enthusiasm and team momentum was lower when the results were announced after a few days. Therefore, this year they changed the format, so that the jury panel would start reviewing the teams’ work since early on Sunday and the winners would be announced around 15h00.

Prizes

The teams compete to come out first, thus winning the chance to represent Mauritius in the WebCup final. The first and second runner up teams also win a bunch of goodies, but also get the chance to be considered to represent Mauritius in the final, if the winning team cannot make it.

There is also a « prix de la viralité » which is given to the team that obtains the most amount of Facebook likes on their « carnet de route » which is a page provided by WebCup organizers to each team to publish their team information & work progress.

My developer colleagues, Nirvan, Jeshta, Kushul and our intern Jordan represented LSL Digital in this year’s WebCup competition.

Winner

LSL Digital won the first prize, followed by Diiz (Ashley Ittoo, Jason Cheng, Jay Dudhee & Julien Louis) and Kryptonite (Ashvin Ettoo, Muktanand Ramloll, Manish Sohodeb, & Nitish Sujeebun representinting SDWorx).

Jordan (left), Nirvan, Kushal (second to the right) and Jeshta.

Team YGNI (Yashna Surajbali, Geshna Dussuruth, Nirvan Bahadoor & Ikshita Madhub), students of SUPINFO International University won the « prix de la viralité » and they also won a special « student » prize that the jury panel decided to award for their outstanding effort.