Front End Coders Meetup May 2024

After several weeks of planning it was finally meetup day at Dayforce. Kushul & I had been in contact with our generous sponsors, and Cedric helped our speakers prepare their talks with the practice run on his twitch channel the week before the event.

I arrived on premises quite early and started setting up my laptop and finalizing my slides. I met really nice people there who were very helpful and welcoming. The audio logistics available was quite impressive.

Intro

After about 45mins of mingling, the event started with a brief introduction by Sandeep Ramgolam who welcomed everyone and thanked Dayforce for hosting the event. I explained the agenda for the evening and invited Ashwini and hear team to give a brief introduction about Dayforce.

There were many first time attendees to the meetup and it was great to see so many new faces.

Talks

• Chervine Bhiwoo - Enhancing Frontend Security for Secure evelopment
• Michaël Jules - Personalized Development Environment (PDE)
• Khali Lame - Building your website for everyone
• Gaël Latouche - Building in public - Electoral Data isualization in Streamlit
• Sandeep Ramgolam - Scroll Driven Animations

Enhancing Frontend Security for Secure evelopment - Chervine Bhiwoo

Chervine Bhiwoo shared his experience on how to enhance frontend security for secure development. He mentioned industry standards such as OWASP and how to test your application for security vulnerabilities. We all love doing fancy stuff on the frontend but we should not forget that it's possible to introduce vulnerabilities via the frontend of our websites or mobile applications.

Personalized Development Environment (PDE) - Michaël Jules

Mike brought us on his discovery journey of PDEs. He is now a proud daily user of neovim and he explained how a PDE can improve productivity of a developer. It was quite impressive to see that even his slides were in the terminal. He encouraged everyone to customize their work environment, regardless of the application they are using.

Lunch Break & Networking

After the talks, I urged everyone to come join us for the group photo before we gatherd for the amazing open buffet that Dayforce put at our disposal. This was probably the best lunch we've had at a meetup. It was a great opportunity to network with the speakers and other attendees. The staff of dayforce also took the crowd for a trip around their office.

Building your website for everyone - Khali Lame

Khali Lame shared his experience on how to build a website that is accessible to everyone. He explained the importance of accessibility and how to test your website for accessibility. He also shared some tools that can help developers test their website for accessibility.

Accesibility is a topic that is often overlooked by developers and as asked by an audience member, it's difficult to know when a developer should start caring about it.

I should seize this opportunity to mention that Kushul & I offer MQA Approved Accessibility training at upcode.mu!

Building in public - Electoral Data Visualization in Streamlit - Gaël Latouche

Gaël attended a few other meetups in the past and since he's now a builder himself and is creating cool side projects, it was really great to have him in the speaker line up. He spoke about building in public and used his Electoral Data project as an example. He explained how he used Streamlit to create the data visualization and how he shared his progress online.

I think its amazing that more people are using publicly available data to build cool projects and share their progress online. The more the merrier !

Scroll Driven Animations - Sandeep Ramgolam

Lastly I was up to present my talk on Scroll Driven Animations. During recently GDE events online, there were a lot of really cool web platform features that were showcased. Scroll driven animations are the ones i'm most excited about and I seized this opportunity to do a small talk on how they work and how you can implement them in your projects in very simple steps.

The code itself is very simple, which is why I chose to live demo it for everyone so that they could follow along. I also shared some resources that can help you get started with scroll driven animations and some demos by Bramus Van Damme.

Quiz Time

I must admit we were past our end time and I had to rush through the quiz. We had a technical issue with the AI-generated quiz (first time this happens!), so in order to not waste time, we decided to keep it simple and do a "raise your hands to answer" oral quiz without any devices.

We might have started with some very hard questions and then moved on to easier ones. Congrats to Danshil, Alexandre and Mahima for winning the prizes!

Since Danshil was first, he also wins our grand prize, a free ticket to React Summit offered by our at JS Nation.

Post Meetup

After the meetup, a few of us went to chill at Kumba. I had the pleasure to meet Ophellia, and Khali and we had a great time around coffee and talking tech.