day 1 of Ubucon Kenya was packed. like, properly packed. the kind of lineup where every talk makes you want to go home and spin up a new project. here’s a rundown of everything that went down.
Ubuntu cloud-init: from development to production with Multipass
speaker: Duncan Njoroge (@guyfromtheke)
Duncan kicked things off with a practical walkthrough of cloud-init and Multipass for local development workflows. the core idea is simple: you define your entire server configuration in a YAML file (packages, users, SSH keys, scripts) and cloud-init applies it when an instance boots. Multipass lets you spin up Ubuntu VMs locally with that same cloud-init config, so your local dev environment mirrors what you’ll deploy to production.
the real value here is portability. you build and test locally on your homelab, and when you’re ready, the same cloud-init config works on AWS, GCP, Azure, or any cloud provider that supports it. no more “works on my machine” for infrastructure. Duncan walked through the full lifecycle, from writing the YAML config to launching instances with Multipass to migrating seamlessly to cloud environments.
solid opener. the kind of talk that makes you realize you’ve been doing local dev setup the hard way.
building enterprise knowledge systems with agentic RAG and knowledge graphs
speaker: Western Onzere (MLOps/AI Systems Architect)
Western went deep on the limitations of standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and made a strong case for combining it with knowledge graphs. standard RAG retrieves document chunks based on similarity, which works fine until you hit what he called the “Apple Problem,” where the word “apple” could mean the fruit, the company, or the record label, and a basic vector search has no way to disambiguate.
agentic RAG adds a layer of intelligence on top: the system can plan multi-step retrievals, decide which tools to use, and verify its own reasoning before returning an answer. pair that with a knowledge graph that encodes relationships between entities and you get something much more robust. Western showcased Telos, a legal AI workspace with over 300,000 case law records, as a real-world example of this architecture in action. the system combines dense retrieval with graph-based traversal so it can handle queries that require understanding how legal concepts relate to each other.
this was one of those talks where you walk away understanding why the current wave of “just throw it in a vector database” approaches has a ceiling.
LXD in production: building a cost-effective private cloud on bare metal for African deployments
speaker: Mucheru Maina (Senior DevOps, Ignite Energy Access)
this was easily the most comprehensive talk of the day. Mucheru laid out a complete blueprint for running LXD as a private cloud alternative to AWS or GCP, with hard cost numbers to back it up.
he started with the fundamentals: LXD sits between Docker containers and full virtual machines, giving you the isolation of VMs with the speed and density of containers. from there he covered profiles, networking options (bridge, macvlan, port forwarding, OVN overlays), storage pools (directory, btrfs, zfs, lvm), and a full multi-container production setup with day-2 operations like snapshots, backups, and monitoring.
the cost comparison was the standout moment. for equivalent specs, AWS runs about $4,416 per year while a Hetzner bare-metal setup with LXD comes in around $600 per year. for startups and companies operating in Africa where cloud bills can eat into already tight margins, that difference is massive. he was also honest about when LXD is the wrong choice, which is something you don’t see enough in conference talks.
if you’re running infrastructure in Africa and haven’t looked at LXD on bare metal, this talk was basically a manual for getting started.
an open blueprint for climate resilient microrobot swarms using Ubuntu
speaker: Stacey Ingolo
Stacey presented something genuinely different: solar-powered microrobot swarms designed to harvest water from air for arid regions in Kenya, specifically Turkana, Marsabit, and Garissa. the robots run on Ubuntu Core, use swarm intelligence to coordinate with each other, and connect back to cloud monitoring dashboards through IoT protocols.
the concept brings together robotics, climate resilience, and open-source software in a way that feels very specific to the problems East Africa actually faces. water scarcity in those regions is real and ongoing, and Stacey’s approach of using coordinated autonomous systems powered by open-source tooling is the kind of innovation that deserves more attention and funding.
one of those talks that reminds you the Ubuntu community builds things that go way beyond servers and desktops.
Signvrse: powering inclusive communication for a connected world
speaker: Elly Savatia (CEO, Signvrse)
Elly presented Signvrse, an AI-powered sign language accessibility platform built for the Deaf community. the product lineup includes Terp 360 (an avatar-based signing interpreter), Terp for Web (browser-based accessibility), and sign language captioning for video content.
what stood out was the open-source contribution side. the team has released Motion-S, a dataset of over 12,467 Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) sequences, and Kiseki, a visualization tool for sign language data. they’ve partnered with Huawei, UNESCO, Google, and Microsoft, created over 300 opportunities for the Deaf community, and validated more than 6,000 KSL signs.
this is the kind of project where the technology serves a community that has been historically underserved by tech. Elly’s team is building the datasets and tools that make sign language AI possible in the African context, and doing it in the open. respect.
building a secure home lab with Raspberry Pi and Tailscale
speaker: FelixJumason (Tailscale Insider Africa)
Felix walked through setting up a home lab with a Raspberry Pi secured by Tailscale’s mesh VPN. the talk opened with the problems of traditional home networking and VPN setups: they’re finicky, they route all traffic through a central hub, and they don’t scale well.
Tailscale flips that model with identity-based mesh networking built on WireGuard. every device gets a stable IP on your tailnet, and connections are peer-to-peer. Felix showed the full setup process, from installing Tailscale on a Pi with a single curl command to running services like Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking and Nextcloud for self-hosted file storage, all accessible securely from anywhere.
the use cases and live demos were a nice touch. if you’ve been meaning to set up a home lab but keep putting it off because the networking feels intimidating, this talk made it look very approachable.
Launchpad: open source collaboration and Linux-focused development
speaker: Charles Odada (UbuCon Kenya 2026)
Charles closed out day 1 with a deep dive into Launchpad, Canonical’s open-source software collaboration and hosting platform. he covered what Launchpad is (a platform for hosting code, tracking bugs, building packages, and managing translations), why the Ubuntu archive matters for the millions of users on Ubuntu and downstream distributions like Linux Mint and Kubuntu, and how Personal Package Archives (PPAs) let developers distribute software outside the main archive.
the talk covered building packages for multiple architectures (amd64, arm64, armhf, riscv64, and more), the Launchpad community features like Answers, Teams, and Translations, and even experimenting with Launchpad locally using Soyuz and Qastaging. Charles emphasized that collaboration is non-negotiable in open source and that Launchpad’s source code is itself fully open source.
a fitting closer for a conference built around the Ubuntu ethos. if you’re developing for Linux and haven’t explored Launchpad, the documentation is a good place to start.
day 1 done. seven talks, zero filler. the range of topics, from infrastructure cost optimization to microrobot swarms to sign language AI, really shows where the Ubuntu community in Kenya is headed. looking forward to day 2.
Written and Authored by Chris, Edited and assisted by Claude