Impressions from DevFest Mauritius 2018
In the spirit of continuous learning all your life the GDG Mauritius organised their first full day conference. It is called a DevFest and is fully supported by Google Developers and the Google Developers Group programs. We teamed up with the Developer Students Club (DSC) at the African Leadership Campus to offer multiple tracks of technical presentations and workshops/codelabs to interested attendees.
A few statistics of DevFest Mauritius
Being the GDG Mauritius’ first ever DevFest we are really happy about the outcome of the event and would like to share a few figures with you.
- 20 Sessions (2 workshops/codelabs)
- 15 Speakers (1 Female)
- 110 Attendees (30 Females)
- Over 500 pictures in our Photos album
Some snapshots below which can hardly carry the excitement of attendees at DevFest. Please check out the album on Photos, place your Likes and leave a comment or two for us. And in case that you were part of DevFest Mauritius please upload your own pictures and videos to the album. Much appreciated!
What was going on at DevFest?
Of course, there had been technical talks on various topics. Let me give you a brief summary of what has been addressed:
- Angular — lots of Angular actually
- Flutter in all variations
- Vue.js
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
- Google APIs and Google Local Guides
- Kubernetes
- Digital Accessibility
- Tips & tricks on Searchability and gRPC communication
Surely, we are going to elaborate more on those topics during the upcoming months. Attendees had way more questions to answer than time was available for some speakers to address each and every one.
An empty stomach doesn’t like to study…
We had an absolutely tasty and rich buffet of dishes — veg and non-veg -, great variety of salads and a selection of juices provided by the canteen of the African Leadership Campus.
We noticed that there were second rounds…
Welcome to VueVixens Mauritius
Only a few weeks earlier I had an exchange on Twitter with Humeira about the possibility to speak about Vue.js during DevFest Mauritius. What started with a relatively small request of proposals quickly turned into the creation of a new IT community — VueVixens Mauritius — as a local chapter.
A Big Win for GDG Mauritius as a community
We were able to extend our reach into new areas and to attract new interested parties to come and attend the sessions. Particularly we worked together with the DSC ALU which helped us with the formal aspects of the event, like registration desk, badges, hand out of t-shirts and guiding attendees in general. Also, we are happy to have reached approx. 25% female participation (attendees) but are worried about our single female presenter who did an amazing job — both her talk and her workshop were well-received. Overall it was a great networking experience, and so far we got solely positive feedback from all sides.
Shout out and Thanks!
Our gratitude to everyone behind this campaign at Google Developers and GDG world wide. Thank you so much to enable us to bring more Google technology to the local IT geeks. And thanks to your detailed style guides and the provided material it was a breeze for us to organise.
Interested to read more?
This article was originally published here: https://www.mscc.mu/devfest-mauritius-2018/
