Front-end Coders Meetup

The 5th frontend meetup of the year was structured a little differently from the previous ones. We went for a lightning-talk style this time, which means more speakers and shorter sessions. This has the advantage of covering a larger range of topics, but doesn't let the presenter deep dive in the subject. The topic this time around was Fancy New Tech, in which we tried to cover a lot of the “new” web technologies that are sometimes legit, sometimes buzzwords ! The goal was to have an overview of each tech and let the audience member investigate further if they're interested. Also, we had a semi-outdoor setup in the beautiful office of ACENSI Mauritius.

Intro Session

As usual, I kicked off the session by introducing who are the frontend coders, why we do meetups, and a few updates. We have a new homepage on the website, we have published photos from previous meetups on the website (thanks @mgjules for the awesome photo-sync project)

I came prepared with my custom t-shirt

Speakers

Sandeep Ramgolam - Bun a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime
Mahima Ramgolam - Sli.dev - Presentation tool for developers
Arwin Neil Baichoo - WebAssembly
Jordan Bievenue - Photogrammetry
Percy Mamedy - Splade - The magic of Inertia.js with the simplicity of Blade
Renghen P. - Carbon Lang
Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer - Contracting: Sharpening the edge to deliver
Michaël Jules - Astro: fast websites next-gen island architecture.

Before starting with the first presentation, The MD of ACENSI Mauritius Reena Seetohul introduced her company and her team and gave an overview of what they do. Of course, they're recruiting if you're interested!

Sandeep Ramgolam - Bun a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime

I spoke about the new JavaScript all-in-one runtime name bun. I introduced the project and the people around it (well 1 person). Unfortunately I couldnt demo what it did because I was getting segfaults while trying it on Linux in a bare bones create-react-app.

Mahima Ramgolam - Sli.dev - Presentation tool for developers

Mahima spoke about sli.dev which is a very simple but powerful tool for creating presentations using Markdown. She demonstrated how to create slides, use themes, format the slides and even cool features like having Video or Annotation during a presentation.

Arwin Neil Baichoo - Web Assembly

Arwin spoke about the what and why's of WebAssembly, pointing out the useful use cases with a couple of demos. The first demo was a rust program that compiled to web assembly, then was called using JavaScript in a webpage.

It was very enlightening to see how the process actually works and “what talks to what”. He then ran a video converter, using ffmpeg, in-browser to convert a file from video to GIF.

Jordan Bievenue - Photogrammetry

The next presentation was about a technique called Orthomosaic, nowadays known as Photogrammetry. Jordan walked use through the history of this process dating back to da Vinci time. He showed how a capture of real life objects could be done using a drone and rendered in a web friendly format.

He loaded the capture of a construction site being built onto a webpage that we could interact with in 3d. As he described it, art met science.

Percy Mamedy - Splade - The magic of Inertia.js with the simplicity of Blade

Percy showcased Splade, a way to write SPAs but without really writing any JavaScript. It uses blade files and Vue renderless components to tie things together. This is targeted at backend developers who want to stay in their blade environment but still be able to add interactions to a web page, like modals, toasts, show hide panels.

Lunch

We had amazing pizzas sponsored by Acensi from L'ardoise Resto. Everyone enjoyed it, and we had a little networking session during the lunch half hour.

Since Jordan was present with his drone, of course we went for drone-group-photo with the beautiful scenery.

Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer - Contracting: Sharpening the edge to deliver

After exploring new techs for a few hours, it was time to get back down to earth. Abur-Rahmaan helped everyone understand when should someone experiment with something new and when they should pick stable technologies to meet client expectations, especially for contracting or freelancing works. Replying to an audience member question, he said instead of looking at GitHub stars, GitHub forks are a better metric to know if that project can be considered for use.

Renghen P. - Carbon Lang

In his unique ways of explaining things and his vast experience with programming languages, Renghen gave us a brief history of C and C++, before coming to Carbon Lang, a new languages which aims to have bidirectional interoperability with C++.

It's typesafe to say he wasn't fond of the new language and advised the attendees to follow from afar.

Michaël Jules - Astro: fast websites next-gen island architecture.

Mike went last this time and he show-cased QUITE THE LIST by demo'ing his newly built portfolio over at mgjules.dev

UnoCSS
Astro
VSCode DevContainer
Directus 9
Netlify Deploys
Swup
CF Edge Caching

There was a little hiccup when he tried to connect his laptop and of course, windows decided to update. But he patched through nevertheless.

Post Meetup Chat

Everyone hang out after the meetup for around half an hour, and we caught up with each other. We even had time for a small photo session. Thanks to ACENSI once again for the welcome in their beautiful office. Stay tuned for the next meetup !

Thanks to

Neil for the awesome pictures
Jordan for the pictures and drone photos
Nadeem & Reena for welcoming us
All speakers for taking the time to share their knowledge

Some fun snaps

Prepping for the group photo

Attentive attendees

Happy Attendees

Flexing the new website landing page

Attendees Chilling

PIZZA

Attentive attendees