Our fourth meetup of the year took place on the 2nd of May 2026 at Marble Arch Hotel. We had 25 attendees. A majority of them new faces! We sincerely thank all those who could make it to the meetup for coming. Your presence is the gift that keeps on giving. For those who couldn't make it, remember, you are always welcome 🤗.
We had initially planned to have three sessions, 'MPD as a music streaming service and a bonus talk Uhuru, Uhuru, Uhuru, Uhuru' by Benson Muite, 'Optimized DBMS with TidesDB' by Bala Grivine, and 'Building TCP to HTTP from scratch' by Daniel Muringe. We only had the first two as time run out to have the last talk. There's nothing to worry about, Daniel Muringe will be speaking on the 6th of June. Come one, come all!
Uhuru, Uhuru, Uhuru, Uhuru and MPD as a music streaming service
Benson Muite started his session by speaking about free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. He addressed the four essential freedoms of free software, namely the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share software. The freedoms are listed below:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0 / uhuru 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1 / uhuru 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2 / uhuru 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3 / uhuru 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Participants shared free applications that they regularly use. They also discussed restrictions to freedom on some cloud software as a service platforms.
Benson then did a demo of using Music Player Daemon (MPD) as a local streaming service. MPD is a powerful application that runs on Linux and Android. It can play a wide variety of sound files while being controlled through the network. Attendees tried to control MPD using M.A.L.P. from their phones, but only a few could control and hear sound simultaneously with the setup provided.
Read how one can set up and use MPD as written by Benson here.
Optimized DBMS with TidesDB
Bala Grivine, an open-source contributor to TidesDB and a first-time speaker, gave us a deep dive into TidesDB - a high-perfomrance pluggable storage engine that is used for applications that write a lot of data to the database. He shared what TidesDB is, what it does and how it compares against and to other DBMS systems. He also mentioned how he fixed the WAL hole problem that he found in TidesDB and it got merged upstream. Yay! You can find more in depth infomation about it when you read about the WAL hole problem on his blog.
Watch Grivine's talk below.
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Food, networking and stuff
The attendees brought snacks and we shared it amongst ourselves. Check out the photos below.
Acknowledgements
I thank Benson, Grivine and Daniel for taking the time to prepare for their sessions.
Shout-out to Douglas for always delivering on the posters. I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Shout-out to Hesus for taking the pictures and videos. Your services are always appreciated.
I'd also like to thank the attendeess for taking time out of their busy schedules to come to the meet-up. I hope you learnt something new and I'm looking forward to seeing you next time.
And you dear reader, thank you for reading this report. If you weren't able to make it to this meet-up, know that you are welcome to the next one.
June Meetup
Remember, we meet on the first Saturday of the month. See you on the 6th of June at 1500 EAT.
Details of the location will be shared before the meet-up date. Keep on eye on this post for that piece of information.
I hope to catch you on the day!