I had the opportunity to speak again at the Developers Conference at Caudan Mauritius. It’s a must attend event for any person working in IT.

Upon my arrival I was given a speaker gift.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg a bit. Maybe I’ll destined to be rich as him too. Lol 🤣

My first topic was “My First Baby Steps with Git”. It was aimed towards students held developers who have not yet started using Git. Despite being in peak lunch time, there was quite a good turnout on attendees. There were good interaction with the crowd. Thanks to my friend Avish to have taken photographs during my sessions.

The second talk which I held was more geared towards IoT enthusiasts. I showed a little demo on how we can integrate social media with internet of things. For example, I demoed how to turn on a light bulb using a Facebook message.

Bonus: My friend Vidush invited me to his talk as a guest along with Priyeshan and Alex. We got the opportunity to share our story on how we got into the entrepreneurship journey. And the question time was lit. The audience didn’t hold back their questions. They took full advantage of the panelists present. There’s indeed a huge interest in entrepreneurship in Mauritius. I hope we can become the silicon valley in the Indian Ocean. There’s still a long way to go.

The other sessions I attended were of really high quality. I was really happy with the conference overall. I hope the future events get even bigger and better.

 

 

 

 

I got the invitation by the Linux User Group of Mauritius Meta (LUGM) 2 days before the event but I managed to make the time to attend it. The guest was Lubos Kocman.

I’m mostly an Ubuntu person – my laptop has been KDE Neon since quite some years now which is based on Ubuntu – so it would be interesting to see what are the other side of the world are doing.  Here’s a few interesting points I learnt:

1. openSUSE is now an Umbrella for several distros such as Tumbleweed, Leap and MicroOs. They are different distro suited at different environments depending on your needs.

The event ended by a sponsored drink by OceanDBA. I chose a non-alcohoic drink ofcourse 😛

OceanDBA is a company which provides expert consultancy for open-source databases within the MySQL eco-system. You may read more on them here: https://www.oceandba.com/

And who doesn’t like goodies? The attendees got a copy of LINUX MAGAZINE which also includes an installation DVD. Unfortunately all the laptops which I bought in the last 10 years, I made sure it doesn’t has a disk reader as they have become almost obsolete nowadays (except for Play Station games which I noticed are still sold on BluRay disks)

I hope we’ll be able to have more physical events in the upcoming days in the tech community. Let’s hope this covid thing ends once and for all.

In order to develop awesome product and services for my company LEFINTECH LTD, I need the best possible tools to do so. But the company  is a new startup in Mauritius, we have limited budget so we had to find best compromises in terms of features and price. The LG 29WL500 seems to be the perfect match for me.

Why did I choose ultra-wide instead of 2 monitors?

1. Small footprint on the desk

I live in a very small studio with no place to put a dedicated work desk, I needed something compact. A single 29 inch ultra wide display is perfect. It allows 2 applications to open side by side while still being usable. Website would not go into tablet mode as they do with 16:9 aspect ratios.

2. Price

I paid Rs 11,990 for the screen in shop at Fast Click Bagatelle. 2 x 24″ screens would have costed me around Rs 12,000 – Rs 16,000 (Rs 6000-8000 each). But since I get the benefits of 2 screens in 1 at the same price, it was obvious for me to go with it. But further I saw some discrepancies on Fast Click’s website. At 1 place, it is listed as this:

And in the price-list, we can see that it is Rs 11,590. Was the price increased at some point in time?

3. Spreadsheets are much more manageable.

Working in a startup doesn’t limit your role to development. You have to do lots of things which are outside your comfort zone. Doing financial forecasts/analysis is one of the things i found myself doing very often.

The amount of columns you can display is greater. If you work a lot in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Libre Office, I would strongly suggest to switch to an ultra wide.

Cons

1. Doesn’t has USB-C connectivity so you cannot charge your laptop and send display signal with the same cable #richpeopleproblems
2. The screen is 6bit + FRC instead of a real 8bit or even 10bit. Linux doesn’t support HDR or 10bit so not much an issue. Anyways for a work related environment, it really shouldn’t matter
3. No height adjust: This is a big one. I had to put plywoods underneath the screen in order for it to reach the right height for me.
4. The resolution is only 1080p. Texts don’t look that crisp. at 1440p, this screen would be perfect. But I think for the price, 1080p is still good.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a screen for work, just go ahead and buy this one. You will not regret it 😉

 

I can’t understand why are Windows 13″- 14″ laptops so expensive in Mauritius.

 

The performance of the M1 is simply unmatched in the laptop sphere. How come they charging so much for older windows laptops? Sell them without the Windows licence and give a Rs 5000 – 6000 discount. Anyways, you’re looking for a new laptop around that price range, I’d recommend to go for the Apple M1 if you need performance.

If you have reasons to buy the non-Apple laptops, please feel free to share them with us.

 

I thought the screen was unbreakable but I was wrong. I owned this phone for more than 1.5 years. It fell multiple times: on the road, on the carpet, on the floor in my room. But it didn’t get a single scratch on the screen. I was impressed. And yeah, I didn’t put any screen protector nor a casing during this time.

However one day, the phone fell on the floor in the gym changing room. It was marble tiles and boom! The screen cracked 🙁

I am however able to use the phone like this, it is not presentable if you’re doing a demo in front of a client.

Mobile repair shops in Curepipe and Rose-hill are quoting me Rs 2500 – Rs 3200 to replace the screen while the official Huawei support centre for Mauritius told me it would cost around Rs 3200 to replace. However the will have to order the screen which will take 2 weeks.

Should I get a cheaper replacement screen in a shop or get the original one from the official repair centre? With the specs of the phone, it can easily be used 2 or even 3 years more. 4GB of RAM is quite good.