frontend.mu x Zendō x HIKVision September Meetup

The september frontend.mu meetup was about Supabase, Docker and developer happiness.

  • Written by Sandeep Ramgolam

Sandeep Ramgolam

• 5 min read
frontend.mu x Zendō x HIKVision September Meetup

The September frontend.mu meetup happened with the help of Zendō at the Command Centre of HIKVision, in the ICONES tower ebene on the 23rd of September 2023.

For this meetup we had an awesome helping hand from Terence & Mahima who helped get us in touch with the location by setting up the meetings. Kushul & I visited the location two weeks prior and was blown away by the cool tech on display there and the gigantic screen we would get to use.

Sponsors:

This location had less seating capacity than our recent ones, however that made it feel more lively and interactive the whole time. I would say the vibe was really awesome during the meetup, and I'm sure all attendees would agree.

Final adjustments before we start the event

vibe check

Introduction

As it is customary, I introduced the community of frontend.mu, and what we do by showing a few photos from the previous meetups, and updates to the website. I mentioned that everyone is welcomed to contribute and we are all here to learn and help each other.

Speaking about upcode during the intro

I introduced our upcoming speakers to the audience

  1. Nicolas Mannoo - Software Engineer
  2. Jain Ramchurn - Platform Engineer @ Ringier SA
  3. Sandeep Ramgolam - Frontend Engineer @ Livestorm

I then invited Mr Vikash Lallsing, co-founder of Zendō to speak about his company and what they do. It was fascinating to see the services they offer, in addition to co-working spaces or office spaces, things like virtual address etc.. were mentioned.

Vikash Lallsing introducing Zendō

Frontend News

Before jumping to the first segment, I did a small recap of the news in frontend and open source world as so many things happened recently. Those included:

  • GNOME 45- Chrome 117 Shipped
  • Bun 1.0 is released
  • Astro 3.0 is released
  • v0.dev
  • Typescript Drama TURBO
  • Unity License Drama
  • Kamal by 37Signals Released
  • Svelte Runes
  • Lodash Issue Bankrupcy
  • Next Conf
  • Vite Conf
  • Vue Certification is live
  • nuejs
  • node 16 EOL
  • node 20 LTS

Nicolas Mannoo - Intro to Supabase

Nicolas is the dev who helped us build our authentication system for frontend.mu to allow people to RSVP for meetups directly on the website. That system was built using Supabase, and in his first talk ever at the frontend.mu meetup he gave an overview of what supabase is and why it's a great tool.

The Q & A session was really fun. There were questions about RLS, self-hosting and would a DB Admin ever pick supabase instead of something like postgres.

Jain Ramchurn - Containerizing a NodeJS application

Jain is a very talentend platform engineer who's also the admin of the Local Linux Mirrors in Mauritius. In his presentation today he showed ways to improve a docker file to take advantages of various features of how containerization works in order to have a more efficient docker configuration. I was really impressed and learned a lot during this talk.

I learned about Layers and entrypoints, PID 1 among other things. There was a lot of interesting questions during this presentation as well, and it was apparent that most people learned new things. Ish gracefully expanded on a few points to elaborate on some answers.

Ish gracefully expanded on a few points to elaborate on some answers.

Sandeep Ramgolam - Ways to increase developer happiness.

I prepared a presentation to share my experience about how a developer can increase their own happiness. This presentation was intentionally built to be lighthearted so that the advice dropped along the way could feel relatable. Hopefully, at least one of the numerous things I spoke of, is able to help a developer in their everyday life.

I spoke about how picking a certain role that matches your personality can greatly contribute to your level of happiness. I elaborated on Tooling, Planning, and Environment as well. There were lots of cat pictures included.

Conclusion

We ended quite early as there was no lunch provided this time due to lack of sponsor. Everyone stayed around for some time to network and share their thoughts, and there were good vibes all around. I would say this meetup will be a reference for us frontend.mu organizers, as I believe this is what I would qualify as a successful tech event.  

After-meetup

Since we were already in the ICONES building, a few of us went to the rooftop and had lunch. I must say, some of the food served there were wildly different across the menu. Some dishes were really awesome, and a few were tasteless, and one was literally uneatable. After lunch, I had to rush towards MCB St-Jean to give another presentation at the “Coding for a better world” tech conference.

Random clicks

someone said let's rebuild this app in ruby

Zain wearing a terminal-themed outfit

Attentive Audience

Jack of all trades