Spoon Consulting x frontend.mu x laravel moris x CNFMU February 2026 Meetup

The first frontend.mu meetup of 2026 happened at the offices of Spoon Consulting in Vivéa Business Park, Moka. This one was special because it was a collaboration between three local tech communities — Frontend Coders Mauritius, Laravel Moris and Cloud Native Foundation Mauritius. It's really encouraging to see the local communities coming together like this and I hope we can do more of these cross-community events in the future.

I reached there at around 9.45am and the weather was great. The team at Spoon welcomed me and I started setting up my laptop. One of my demos stopped working so I had to quickly fix it on the spot before the event started(using claude of course).

People started arriving and we were chatting about fun tech stuff before the event while doing the setup. Bruno was showing me his demo and we tried some WebSocket stuff over LAN and it worked perfectly. Spoon graciously offered us breakfast, and as more and more people started arriving, the room started filling up nicely.

Intro

At around 10.45 we decided to kick things off. As usual, I started the meetup by presenting frontend.mu and our mission statement. There were around 10 new faces in the room and the rest were regulars from the local tech community. I introduced who we are and what we do, then briefly introduced each speaker for the day.

Talks

• Clifford Weinmann - Ansible in Action: From K8s Pods to Laravel APIs and a TBD front end
• Dhanveer Sharma Emrith - AI for All
• Sandeep Ramgolam - What is WebMCP and why does it matter?
• Bruno Bernard - PHP can do Whaaat?
• Sandeep Ramgolam - Unspoken costs of running useful AI as a developer

Ansible in Action - Clifford Weinmann

Clifford from Cloud Native Foundation Mauritius, took the stage to talk about Ansible and how to automate the deployment of a Laravel application. It turns out he used a playbook that one of the community members had built, so it was a great demo of how Ansible can be used with existing pieces of a project and be customized to fit your needs.

Personally, this was my introduction to Ansible and I found it very interesting. I'm currently looking into deployment solutions for some side projects I'm working on and this looks like it could be perfect. Definitely going to dig deeper into this.

AI for All - Dhanveer Sharma Emrith

Dhanveer & Krishna, first time speaker at frontend.mu and member of the Spoon team, was up next. He gave us a really well-structured talk about AI. He started at an introductory level, explaining what AI is and how it works, then dug deeper into the topic to show how AI is used at Spoon and at industry scale.

There were several interesting comparisons between deep learning and generative AI, RAGs and other kinds of workflows that involve AI. He then explained how the company is leveraging AI across three different use cases, and those were extremely interesting. A solid first talk, and I hope he comes back with more.

What is WebMCP and why does it matter? - Sandeep Ramgolam

Since we had a few moments before the break, it was my turn. This topic has been up for discussion in the GDE circle and there have been a lot of cool demos around it, so of course I made my own. I built a Web MCP integration with the coders.mu website itself.

After explaining in a few slides what Web MCP is and how different it is from MCP servers, I proceeded to show the demo running in Chrome Canary 146. I had registered tools from the coders.mu website where you could list events, search for events, and search for speakers. I used the Web MCP protocol to ask the inbuilt Chrome MCP inspector to try to control the website and it worked quite well.

I went a little further and registered a "Speak" tool that used the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API to read aloud the findings of the MCP results. The fun part was that I wasn't even typing the prompts — I was using Superwhisper to talk to the agent and the agent was replying via the text-to-speech API. That was pretty cool.

Lunch Break & Group Photo

As it is customary, we gathered for a group photo right before lunch and it was really nice seeing so many people joining us. Then we took a 30-minute break to enjoy pizza and drinks offered by Spoon. Shortly after, the sky opened up and it started raining really heavily. Good thing we were indoors!

PHP can do Whaaat? - Bruno Bernard

After lunch, Bruno was next and he started by introducing Laravel Mauritius, the user group he is representing. He then introduced the philosophy of Laravel — batteries included — where you simply have all the things usually needed for a project, pre-configured and ready to go.

He walked us through several of these built-in options that Laravel offers and then we went deeper into the AI package that Laravel provides. The really amazing part? Bruno actually contributed to this package. It's really cool to see someone from Mauritius contributing to Laravel packages at that level.

I find Laravel itself very interesting even though I'm not a PHP user. The philosophy of Laravel I think expands beyond Laravel itself, and other frameworks like Adonis.js really seem to share this "batteries included" approach to building products. There was a lot of questions and answers during this session, clearly a topic that resonated with many people in the room.

Unspoken costs of running useful AI as a developer - Sandeep Ramgolam

Last session of the day was mine again, and this one was intentionally interactive. I highlighted that to use good AI, you can't just get the second or third best model — you literally have to get the best one to get real work done. Currently, that's Claude Opus 4.6, and it's not cheap. Maybe in a few years when we revisit this blog post, the situation will be completely different, but today this is where things stand.

There weren't many slides for this one. I asked the audience what they thought about how this looks for programmers in the future, and there were really fascinating discussions. Some people argued that programming as a skill for humans might not be here in a few years. There were comparisons with how pretty much nobody writes assembly these days and most developers didn't have to learn it, so by the same analogy, maybe programming itself will be abstracted away and natural language will be enough. Heavy stuff for a Saturday afternoon.

Quiz Time

We wrapped up the talks with the quiz that Cedric built and has been improving steadily. This time we have a league system where people can sign up with an account and when they come back to the next meetup, they still have their points. So we'll essentially have a frontend.mu leaderboard across meetups. The quiz app worked flawlessly and we had two fun topics.

As usual, Alex took first place, Nytiennzo placed second and Zain was third. As promised, the first place winner gets a Claude subscription for one week, offered by Claude.mu.

Post Meetup

We were quite above time so we started packing up. A group moved to Flying Dodo for the after-party and another group headed up north. Yet another great meetup with good vibes all around.

Thanks

Big thanks to Spoon Consulting for hosting us, providing breakfast, lunch and an awesome venue. Thanks to all the speakers for their presentations and to Cedric for the quiz. Thanks to everyone who showed up — see you at the next one!