Justine Ayebale
Uganda
I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology. What I learned doing the degree filled me with enthusiasm for the web. Website design became my focus. Coding the whole site with HTML was a hustle to take the project through to completion. It would take me a long time to deliver hand-coded sites and therefore they were expensive to do with little profit. I persevered since I needed to make a living being a young graduate. Along the way, I volunteered with a team at Cotam Technologies (No longer in business). I worked closely with the web designers and my role was to market, document and support the uploading of content to the websites. I was then introduced to my first CMS, Joomla! I thought for a long time that Joomla was the only CMS. Life became much easier and my income increased thanks to using Joomla to make the sites. That was the start of my journey. Today, depending on clients’ preferences, I use their desired CMS platform or suggest what would work best for them. With their choice, we then build their site at Webstar Uganda. An IT company that I co-direct and webFrontiers Uganda which is my own initiative
| Team | Position | Role | Date Started | Date Ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events | Department Member | Feb 2021 | Mar 2021 | |
| Events Team | Contributor | Feb 2021 | Aug 2022 | |
| Board of Directors | Officer | Vice President | Sep 2020 | Sep 2021 |
Using Joomla has been fun but I have faced the challenge of getting help along the way, as and when I needed it. Then I discovered the Joomla forum and the Joomla community. A gem that was hidden away.
I engaged with and supported fellow female users on how to make their lives easier with Joomla.
I attended a Joomla conference in Nairobi, Kenya, where a larger community gathered. It was educative and eye-opening. Through the material shared there, our understanding grew.
After that meeting, I formed the CMS for women platform. Intended to help new female graduates where we occasionally met, shared ideas about how to use Joomla and the challenges that can lead to.
Joomla day then came to Uganda. It was an exciting and successful event that brought together many web developers.
I became involved in organising Joomla user groups, as well as communicating the meetings to the wider online audience to help boost the meetups.
Unfortunately, I was not able to travel to Spain for the Joomla meetup as well as JandBeyond. Attending would have been fun. I enjoy the community engagements.
Thankfully the Joomla Team helped me to travel to JandBeyond in Krakow-Poland. Meeting a larger joomla community makes a difference and the information taken back to Uganda is very helpful.
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