Virtual Developers Conference 2020 - Mauritius

The developers conference is organized by the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community every year and this time due to the global pandemic, it took place online.

  • Written by Sandeep Ramgolam

Sandeep Ramgolam

• 5 min read
Virtual Developers Conference 2020 - Mauritius

The conference took place on the 9th, 10th and 11th of September and all 4 parallel tracks were streamed on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. As you might have noticed, the theme this year was COMICS, hence the room names being : Batcave, Avengers Tower, New Asgard and Kryptone.

It's the first time that I witnessed a conference of this scale being done online, with multiple hosts on each track welcoming the Speakers and switching between them live on stream, almost doing a "directors" job, and minus some sound issues that happened on Day 1, everything went pretty much super smoothly !

My favourite sessions - in no particular order

  1. Podcast: Linux distributions ( Day 3 / Kryptone Room / Ish )
  2. How to ace your developer interview ( Day 2 / Batcave Room / Dylan Harbor)
  3. Open Data Initiatives for Mauritius ( Day 3 / Kryptone / Ismael Limalia)
  4. PWA: Beyond The Service Worker ( Day 3 / New Asgard Room / Cedric Poilly )
  5. Static generated sites === great performance. What are you waiting for? ( Day 2 / New Asgard / Debbie O'Brien )

Of course there are many more sessions that I need to catch up with.

This was my three screen setup to watch the conference :

Tri-Stream #devconmu spectator setup! #Mauritius pic.twitter.com/PuEBc7SLiM

— Sun 🇲🇺 (@__Sun__) September 9, 2020

I had some fun interactions with speakers on twitter after their talk, and it was all in good spirit

Thanks so much for answering my questions during the stream @debs_obrien !

Built my website using nuxt
would love your thoughts on it ^^https://t.co/AhS4xAgo2w https://t.co/tYOp9y4JSK

— Sun 🇲🇺 (@__Sun__) September 10, 2020

I also fired as many questions as I could during the Open Data initiative session as people from the National Computer Board were present, and they are the right people to provide access to open data to developers like me who enjoy building websites and apps around data.

Vue 3.0 & Accessibility

Like every year, I participated as a speaker in this conference as well, and along with my friend Kushul we delivered a session around Vue, Accessibility, Vuetify and Green Websites. That went really well, and there were a lot of nice questions from the audience.

We decided to pre-record the session to avoid any hiccups that could happen during the livestream, and we joined the livestream after the session to answer the questions.

Of course my pink screen will be memorable on this one. I'm sorry everyone, this is the only webcam I had at hand.

Our session went really well !

If you missed it you can still rewind the livestream and watch it on this link: https://t.co/7uJtAwqKhr

👊 @kushul_soomaree #DevConMu #Mauritius #Conference #Developers #vuejs #frontend https://t.co/66hcSs31f0

— Sun 🇲🇺 (@__Sun__) September 10, 2020

Lightning Talks

The lightning talks were scheduled to be right before the closing ceremony of the conference with me as the host, but unfortunately we could not get all the content ready on time, and I decided to remove it from the schedule one week before the conference to avoid adding any last minute pressure on the organizing team. But don't fret ! We'll be back in the next conference with an even better lightning talk.

Spoiler: The theme for the lightning talk was gonna be "Cocomelon" xD

Announcements

In the closing session, JoKi announced two new websites that were being built in the background for quite some time !

Jobs MSCC

A job portal where companies can post and candidates can apply for tech jobs

MSCC Podcast

A weekly podcast hosted by MSCC with new guests every week. 

These are awesome and will surely fill a gap in the Mauritian market. I was planning on my own podcast, and it's awesome to see more community members going in the same direction! Hey maybe I'll get an invite to be on the mscc podcast?

Conclusion

The conference is now well supported by sponsors and that's great ! My  hope for the next conference is to focus on the community side event more! The next event is the GDG Conference in Mauritius which will also be virtual ! Checkout the social media pages of MSCC for news about that one.