Developers Conference 2024

I had the opportunity to speak and run a workshop at the The Developers Conference 2024 in Mauritius. The conference was held at the Caudan Arts Centre in Port Louis and was attended by over 1500 developers from all over the island. The conference was a great opportunity to meet other developers, learn new things and share my knowledge with the community.

My Talks.

• Building a web app to monitor Power Outages in Mauritius using Nuxt & TailwindCSS
• The frontend developer career path
• Organizting and hosting the Lightning Talks

Talk #1: The Nuxt Workshop - frontend.mu

The frontend.mu community was invited to run a workshop at the conference and I was very excited to be part of it.

I am big fan of Nuxt3 and have been following their progress since years now. My blog was in nuxt previously and i upgraded it to nuxt 3 a bit more than a year ago. the frontend.mu website which was running on astro last year, is now also running fully on nuxt 3. Nuxt 3 has also made it's appearance at my day job and I feel like it's the best tool available for building web apps in 2024. I was very excited to run a workshop on Nuxt 3 at the conference and show people how easy it is to build web apps with Nuxt 3.

Preparations

I had incredible help from Mahima, Cedric, Kushul and Saamiyah to prepare the workshop. We build a small page with instructions from step 1 to X of the workshop and the idea was that, i was going to livecode it during the talk, but if someone wants to go faster or has missed a step, they can refer to the instructions on the page.

Using GitHub Codespaces to run a workshop

I decided against having everyone run npm install locally as it can be a bit of a pain to setup the environment. Stackblitz and Codesandbox use some kind of containerization to run the code and that was something i wanted to avoid in case people bring less powerful laptops. Github Codespaces was the perfect solution for this as it's one click away from a "template" github repository and all the dependencies are installed on a container that runs on the cloud. This way, everyone has the same environment and we can focus on the workshop content.

The Workshop

Location: PACMAN ROOM, Caudan Arts Centre Time: Friday 09:00 - 10:45

The workshop was a great success and I had a lot of fun running it. I started by explaining what Nuxt 3 is and how it can be used to build web apps. I then showed how to create a new Nuxt 3 project and how to add pages, components and styles to the project using TailwindCSS.

It's easy to show off Nuxt 3 because it's truely awesome. I installed tailwindcss from the built-in devtools. So cool.

I also showed how to use the Nuxt 3 router and how to fetch data from an API. The attendees were very engaged and asked a lot of questions. I was very happy to see that some were able to follow along and build their own web apps with Nuxt 3 !

Talk #2: The Frontend Developer Career Path

Location: PACMAN ROOM, Caudan Arts Centre Time: Friday 11:00 - 11:45

This was a talk that I had been wanting to give for a long time. I have been working as a frontend developer for over 10 years now and I have seen a lot of changes in the industry. I wanted to share my experience and knowledge with other developers who are just starting out or who are looking to advance their careers.

I addressed the big elephant in the room: How much moneysss ?!

I tried to give hints about what to do when you reach a certain level in your career and how to keep learning and growing as a developer. I have seen that the same advice does not apply to everyone and that it's important to find your own path and what works for you.

Talk #3: The Lightning Talks

Location: Amphitheatre, Caudan Arts Centre Time: Saturday 13:00 - 13:45

I was also responsible for organizing and hosting the Lightning Talks at the conference. The Lightning Talks are short talks of 5 minutes each where developers can share their knowledge and experience with the community. I had a great lineup of speakers and the talks were very interesting and very fun. I was very happy to see that the Lightning Talks were a success and that the attendees enjoyed them.

YouTube video player

Lightning Talks Lineup

• Chervine Bhiwoo - "Death by SMS"
• Houzair Koussa - "Easter eggs in tech"
• Abdallah Yashir Ramsing - AI Innovations in Video Editing
• Alexandre Bissessur - "Reviving old tech with the Pi Pico"
• Dereck - "The git diffing algorithm"
• Jain Ramchurn - 3 terminal tools to make your life easier
• Sandeep Ramgolam - "Learn by building"

Lightning Talks Highlights

Conference Highlights

Conclusion

Overall, the Developers Conference 2024 was a really fun event for me because I get to meet friends and make new ones. I also had the opportunity to share my knowledge with the community and learn new things from other developers. I'm looking forward to the next conference and hope to see you all there!