Avinash Meetoo – Let us build a Smart Mauritius

Happy New Year 2023

1 January 2023 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I wish you all the very best for 2023.

Looks like things are going to be a bit challenging this year ek “nou pou bizin marye pike” to achieve greatness 👍

Focusing on important and big challenges to achieve Net Zero

30 November 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Today, I participated in a Road to Net Zero conference organized by the School of Sustainable Development and Tourism of the University of Technology, Mauritius and the University of Birmingham, UK. Themes covered during the day were climate change, renewable energy, ESG disclosure and the SDG framework.

The official opening was done by the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development and the Minister of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation.

The keynote speaker was Associate Professor Roshan Boojihawon from the University of Birmingham in the UK. Rudy Oh-Seng, Environment Officer at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, intervened next.

My own presentation was about ways to achieve our 2030 development targets. I spoke about the existing Vision 2030 of the Republic of Mauritius, the UNDP Strategy for 2022 to 2025 and the absolute need to focus on having a skilled workforce to tackle the important and big problems facing us.

Last but not least was Mreedula Mungra, the Chief Executive Officer of the Mauritius Renewable Energy Agency (MARENA), who masterfully explained the steps to follow to achieve the vision of having 60% renewable energy within the next eight years.

In the audience were representatives of the private sector involved in sustainability, academics and students from Mauritius and abroad. The level of interaction between the audience and the speakers was excellent. Many were young professionals and young students and they are instrumental in the country acheiving its many targets.

Tomorrow, the sessions will be more technical and more focussed on ESG disclosure.

A Brief History of Programming (and my journey)

28 November 2022 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

On Wednesday 23 November, I made a one hour talk on “A Brief History of Programming” and my own journey as a programmer. It was during Developers Conference 2022.

I did not know that my talk would take place in the large amphitheatre of the Caudan Arts Centre. In some ways, this made it more of a TED-talk than a normal presentation among geeks. And, being the first talk in the morning at 9:00, there were not many people attending… But this was a blessing in disguise because it made my talk more interactive where I had the opportunity to ask questions to the people who came, many of whom I knew personally.

There are many programming languages and they can broadly be classified into programming paradigms according to the features they have. The most popular paradigms are procedural, object-oriented and functional but many others exist.

Over the years, some programming languages became more popular than others (for many reasons). It is not because people are raving about Swift, Kotlin, Go or Rust today which this means than there will not be new programming languages in the future. And this, of course, does not mean that the likes of LISP, C, Java or C# can be discarded.

One essential aspect of learning programming is that it takes time and one needs to know many different paradigms if he/she wants to be a good problem solver (as different problems need to be tackled from different perspectives). Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, put it nicely.

The point is to learn at least half a dozen different programming paradigms over 10 years.

My own journey as a programmer

My parents bought our first computer in 1988 when I was 15. I had discovered programming when I was 12-13 but, because I didn’t own a computer, I programmed “on paper”. I had a big notebook with pages and pages of algorithms in some kind of pseudocode.

Here are some slides from my presentation which basically tells my story as a programmer but also as someone who loves to try new programming languages and paradigms on a regular basis.