My journey as a self-taught developer began with a burning curiosity. Growing up in Uganda, where resources were scarce, I couldn’t afford formal education.
Instead, I relied on hardwritten notes from friends and online tutorials.
As time went on, I got good at building websites for local businesses, each proving my self-taught skills. But my dream of joining a major tech company seemed unreachable. Rejections piled up, all due to my academic background and self-doubt crept in.
Then there was a turning point. A friend I had shared my knowledge with landed a job at a promising startup in Kampala. He believed in me and recommended me. For five years now, I’ve been working remotely for that very company. They saw the potential in passionate, self-taught talent.
I work as a part-time server admin for this particular company, ensuring that the Patasente platform is always secure and online.
Because technology presents numerous life-changing opportunities, I decided to take advantage. As I grew, I learned more skills to compliment my coding skills. Learning to write, sell, and market is making me an incredible technical writer. As a technical writer, I write about SQL, WordPress, frontends, and more.
I want to use my passion and optimism to cultivate positive energy among the different individuals I meet so that we can achieve collective growth and progress.
To be more specific, I appreciate questioning the status quo because that is how we, as humans, and our ecosystem show ongoing improvement. Over the years, I’ve created web and mobile apps to handle challenging life situations such as lack of connectivity, unemployment, e-commerce, and financial troubles. I’m proud to have started and mentored multiple firms, as well as taught students about business and technology. I teach the PHP and JavaScript programming languages, as well as WordPress, on my YouTube channel.
We had some tiny plots where we cultivated food crops like a peasant household. We may distribute food to families and sell some for profit during the harvest season. I was more interested in planting than in selling. My aunt supported her children, her sister, and me in this way.
In retrospect, this is the cornerstone of my entrepreneurial passion.
The situation inspired me to repay the affection in order to express my gratitude for the love I received from my family, who served as my father and mother.
During my high school years, a friend introduced me to computers, which became my pastime, and I’m fortunate to have developed a career out of something I adore.
I used to like playing with my toys as a child. I could either repair them for my friends or manufacture my own out of barbed wire.
I was able to help the establishment and sustainability of Gagawala Graphics Limited (Gagawala), a creative and printing agency situated in Kampala, Uganda, by connecting the dots. Gagawala develops and implements solutions to assist small enterprises and organizations in differentiating themselves and establishing a strong market presence. Gagawala has supplied corporate branding, graphics design, printing, web development, and other associated services to over 500 Ugandan and African firms since 2015.
If you follow me on social media, you’ve probably seen me share information.
Sharing information comes easy to me, and I believe it should come naturally to everyone if we want to leave the world a better place than we found it. This inspired me to co-found Ablestate Creatives Limited (ablestate.co), a software development firm dedicated to sourcing and hiring developers in Uganda on behalf of tech businesses.
Because I couldn’t afford a PlayStation, I pursued software development.
There used to be internet cafes in my town where kids could play games like Need for Speed, Fifa, and others.
A fee was imposed on children. Parents who didn’t want their children to be out did everything they could to get them PlayStations.
Most families, however, could not afford both options. I belonged to one of these families.
I looked into other options and became interested in building my own PlayStation. Along the way, I realized I needed to learn to code.
I enrolled in the MacMaine School of Computing in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to learn programming.
Before enrolling me, I was warned that due to my background, getting closer to what I wanted would be nearly impossible. But I’d like to thank Mr Wambedde for teaching me and others how to programme in C, C++, VB, and JAVA. It aided my self-study of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL. Which has a strong pillar in focusing on my software development career.
My aunt was always present when my mother and father were not. She could make time to attend speech days and other school functions. She was there whenever the school called a parents’ meeting, and she was there when I got sick. I think she wanted me as a child to feel loved and educated. She believed in me and always encouraged me to help her children with their homework.
This, I believe, is the source of my desire to share knowledge. Senga Nakato, I will be eternally grateful.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, left an indelible impression on me in my early computing days. I appreciated his innovation in open-source tools that have influenced how we use technology.
It was empowering me to learn and practice even before I knew what open-source was.
It is the foundation of my work in the open-source community.