frontend.mu x UDM x Ceridian Meetup - August 2023

In the August meetup we spoke about Conference Talks, Building Games, How to level up as a Developer and Security Tips

  • Written by Sandeep Ramgolam

Sandeep Ramgolam

• 5 min read
frontend.mu x UDM x Ceridian Meetup - August 2023

The august frontend coders meetup took place on the 26th of August 2023 at the Universite des Mascareignes campus. After taking a pause in July, Kushul and I planned another meetup featuring really awesome speakers.

For this meetup we had the tremendous help of Manshika from UDM who made sure we had a cool location to host around 100 people. In addition, we got the support of the Ceridian Mauritius Team, to whom we're really grateful for helping with the expenses of the meetup, even on a short notice!

Sponsors:

  • Universite des Mascareignes - Venue
  • Ceridian - Lunch and Amenities

We're back in another lecture theatre, and we welcomed around 70 people in this meetup. We had to deal with a few technical issues at the start, but those were quickly resolved, and we started the meetup at 10:21am.

Introduction

As usual, I greeted everyone and explained who are the frontend coders and what is our goal. I then shared some updates about our website and all the awesome pull requests we received during the past month. It has been the most active month for us on GitHub, with many new awesome features being added.

It was then time for the sponsors to tell the audience a little about themselves, and so Manshika from UDM and Youvraj from Ceridian addressed the room.

Manshika, UDM, addressing the frontend.mu audience

Youvraj, Ceridian Mauritius, addressing the frontend.mu audience

Youvraj noted that Ceridian has a focus friday policy, which is something super awesome to have as an engineer! I can tell, because we have them too at Livestorm.

It was time for our speakers to take the stage, and so I introduced all of them before we kick off the interesting topics.

  1. Saamiyah Peerun - Frontend Engineer @ Ringier AG
  2. Muhammad Houzair Koussa - Software Engineer @ Stratalis
  3. Jeshta Bhoyedhur - Backend Developer @ Publicis
  4. Alberto de Santis - IT Director Providus Technologies
  5. Cedric Poilly - Streamer, Software Engineer, Coach

Saamiyah Peerun - Go from Attendee to Speaker

Saamiyah, introduced herself and announced the awesome news that she's now a Google Women Tech Maker, Ambassador !

She shared useful tips as to how to give a talk:

  • the very first steps of picking an event to speak at
  • how to pick a topic and practice
  • how to phrase your topic submission
  • how to eventually prepare and practice the talk itself.

Muhammad Houzair Koussa - Code & Philosophy

Houzair delivered one of the most captivating talks I've seen at the Developers Conference last month, and I thought people who didn't attend really missed out. I asked him to do the talk again at the frontend.mu meetup, and he didn't disappoint. Numerous people reported that they were super impressed with his talk.

I won't pretend I can summarize his talk in a few paragraphs, but it was an amazing journey about how to prove or disprove something and building a framework to do that, and then applying that framework to code. It was truly fascinating. You can see his slides here and visit thephilosophicalcode.com for more content.

Jeshta Bhoyedhur - Her experience as a woman in tech, and tips on how to secure web applications

Jestha shared her experience as a girl in tech since several years and how she was able to progress in the industry. It's really great to see that people who i worked with in the past continue to do cool things and get ahead in their career! She then shared various tips about how to secure a web application based on her backend experience.

Lunch & Photoshoot

We literally ordered 100 burgers from a fantastic restaurant, Ti Kabann, and proceeded to network outside. Big thanks to all those who helped to distribute the food during lunchtime, especially the guys from MDX! I had short conversations with some attendees, spoke about ongoing open source projects and of course, ate my burger and chips.

Alberto de Santis - The Journey from Junior to Senior

Alberto, IT Director at Providus Technologies, shared his valuable knowledge about careers in IT and pressed on some really relatable points. e.g. After 3 years of university students, you're just a junior ! Why's that? He gave advice as to how to get to the next level and take charge of your career in IT.

Cedric Poilly - Let's Play

Our local, Twitch Streamer was up on stage showcasing the stuff he built recently. He has quite an impressive portfolio and some apps I even use myself.

Some of the stuff he built are:

All really cool stuff! I think most frontend's are made with Nuxt3. Cedric explained how he build the game platform, the game night, while streaming, and the meetup was the big test, with real people, and flaky network.

He took four random topics from the audience, and the game generated questions about those topics using OpenAI apis. Everyone in the audience then joined the game from their mobile phones, and we had a round of 20 questions. It was really fun! Unfortunately (or as expected), there were some bugs, and I'm sure he'll use that data to make the game even better !

Quiz Time!

I prepared a quick kahoot of 10 questions during the meetup, and it was open for anyone to play! Up for grabs were 3 Jetbrains licenses, and 1 JavaScript beer!

Dereck wins the JS Beer

The winners were :

  1. Houzair
  2. Dereck
  3. Saamiyah

Conclusion

Preparing those meetups are always a lot of work behind the scenes, and really time-consuming. However, when it's done, and you feel like you've helped someone learn something new, it feels like it's worth it. See you in the next one!