The Beach Meetup 2024

If you want to skip the planning to read what happened during the meetup itself please click here

Advent Calendar Announcement for frontend.mu

One of the members of frontend.mu created an advent calendar for the community that you can access here: https://advent.frontend.mu

There will be daily challenges until the final day on chrismas 2024! Everyone is welcome to participate and join the fun.

Planning

Making this day happen took a lot of planning, effort and support from a lot of people, without which it would have been impossible. After last year's successful event, we wanted to make it a tradition to host an outdoor tech event, in a very relaxed setting. As we do for all the meetups, we went to scout the location in advance to make sure it's safe and appropriate for the event. After trying to find a beach with the necessary criteria, we ended up going back to the same spot as last year.

If that's interesting to you, these were my criteria:

• Proximity to the beach
• Trees to provide shade
• Large enough grass area for the event
• Public space
• Large enough so that we don't disturb others and others don't disturb us
• Likeliness of good weather
• Not too windy as we need to hear people speak

If you know of other spots that match this description, PLEASE let me know !

Carpooling

Because no buses can reach this location, we ask attendees to disclose if they need a ride during the RSVP process. Using this information, we then coordinated with the drivers and non-drivers to make sure everyone could get a ride to the location and be on time. Huge thanks to everyone who were kind enough to take one or two passengers. 🙏

Using Vroume

This project is made for carpooling and events. We've been talking to the founder, Mervyn since months about using this as an option to coordinate the event rides and some people managed to use it. That was very cool. I hope this project takes off.

Logistics

A tech presentation has slides, and we have no TV or Projector at the beach, so we needed to solve this. Everyone carries a screen in their pocket, right? So we hosted a Jitsi server in a datacenter in Mauritius so that everyone could join a call and see the slides on their phone. Thanks to Zain and Arwin for setting up this server for us.

I must say the mobile data connectivity was not great and while we managed to get through the presentations, it wasn't 60fps and sometimes the signal wasn't even 4G. We need a better solution for this problem. Probably a LAN solution. We can figure this out together for next time, right ?

Our Sponsors

Kushul and the team at Klanik spoke of this event a few months in advance, and we were very happy that agreed to sponsor us! Many thanks to Tejas and Rachel who got us really tasty food for the day. We deeply appreciate a company that tries to support a community effort, and we can see how they're trying to get people more interested into tech as career by making the job fascinating with a chill work environment.

The event

La Cambuse Public Beach

Mervyn was first at the spot, and then the team from Grand Bay joined him. I arrived shortly after. I noticed Alex and Delphine were already there. The sun was shining as bright as you could imagine, what a hot day !

We carried all our stuff to the meetup spot, which was about 5–6 minutes long minutes walk from the parking location. People joined us every minute and it was soon quite a crowd. We set up the tables, laptops while people passing by got curious about what's happening here. We distributed some litchis, mango salads and food coupons to everyone before kicking off the event.

Intro

As usual, I explained the goal of the community to our attendees and introduced our sponsor and speakers for the day.

Speaker Lineup

Sandeep Ramgolam - Frontend News & Updates

Ludovic AH-YOUNG - Accessibility in UX/UI: Designing for Everyone

Fabrice Madre - GSAP & SVG Animations

Anish - Javascript & Typescript Tips

Alexandre Bissessur - Kubernetes + frontend.mu

Sandeep Ramgolam - Frontend News & Updates

My news segment was super short this time, so I went first. I covered the JavaScript trademark case that Deno has recently filed against oracle. Awaiting progress in january. I highlighted the big event of the moment, the World Chess Championship, and how the two most popular websites are run. Chess.com vs. Lichess.org. Finally, I spent some time talking about TailwindV4 and it's novelties.

Ludovic AH-YOUNG - Accessibility in UX/UI: Designing for Everyone

Ludovic, first time speaker at frontendmu and designer at Klanik was next. He spoke about accessibility and how design is meant to be for everyone, while showing some compelling statistics about why companies should care bout a11y and not let it be an afterthought.

Fabrice Madre - GSAP & SVG Animations

Fabrice then took the "stage" to talk about animations and GSAP specifically with some examples. I must admit, the laggy screen sharing didn't do justice to his demo's. It was really cool seeing his passion for development and animations alike.

Lunch break & Photos !

Anish - Javascript & Typescript Tips

Mr n-d-r-d-g was back for another presentation with very, very useful JS and. TS tips. I learned a few things during this session. There were questions regarding the differences between the types of any vs unknown. I will revisit the slides and dive deeper into these tips.

Alexandre Bissessur - Kubernetes + frontend.mu

Yet another attempt for me to understand the management of containers. Alex deployed the frontendmu/frontend.mu monorepo to a Kubernetes cluster he's hosting at home. He walked use through the configuration of those pesky yaml files and how he built the image. In the end, we could see that he was able to build and deploy the website. Note that this is very different from his previous attempt, as we have changed from astro to nuxt and from simple to mono repo in the past year. There were some local network issues that happened, but he was able to figure it out! This lead to some nice discussions about how to debug your k8s deployments.

Hanging out with after the meetup

A few of us went home, some went to get drinks, while a small group and I went for a 2 v 3 football match on the beach. The results of this match are wildly contested, which is why we're having a rematch soon.

Random snaps during the event