On Saturday, 12th January 2020, we had a successful Speaker Session and Launch Aptech Students Club, an inspiration from Developer Student Clubs (DSC) where am a Lead. Had support from other community Leads, Google Cloud Community — Kampala (Mr. Opio Solomon), Google Developers Group — (Mr. Asa Lugada), Facebook Circles — Kampala (Engineer J Edison Abahurire), and 2019 DSC Solution Challenge winner — Muni University (Samuel Mugisha).
How it all started
It was during the mobilization for 2019 DevFest Kla, that I managed to visit a number of universities and institutions inviting them, however, I also informed them about Developer Student Clubs which many were very interested to be part of, including Aptech students. It is then when I met the two tech & community passionate fellow students (Brian and Brook ). We then reached out to the administrators whom I explained to and welcomed the idea of coming up with a community to bring students together to share knowledge. I then reached out to our Program Manager — DSC SSA who gave me a go-ahead, therefore, pushing the launch of the club to 2020.
Come 2020 the students were ready to be part of this amazing community of sharing, collaborating as we learn from each other. Towards the launch, we had to reach out to other Community Leads (mentioned above) who all confirmed their attendance. We published posters that we pinned around the campus and further mobilization on social media continued as usual.
On 12th January, morning the students reading lounge was all filled up by students all ready for the big day. The school administration supported us with speakers and a projector.
keynotes from the speakers
- Mr. Opio Solomon, Lead — Google Cloud Community, Kampala
He shared about the value of community! why everyone needs to be part of a community where one can have a number of opportunities like learning, travel grants, scholarships. Majorly he talked about CloudMentorshipKampala a community-based mentorship program on Google Cloud. It aims at training developers and enthusiasts interested in becoming DevOps Engineers and Architects. ( This was the program that started my journey in Cloud Computing, which is my career now — DevOps)
2. Mr. Asa Lugada, Lead — Google Developers Group, Kampala
He supplemented the value of the community, which he testified about. He shared about opportunities that are currently on-going and also like the recently concluded Google Africa DeveloperScholarship Program (ALC) which he was the program assistant, Uganda. He illustrated that being part of a community helps one to get aware of such opportunities since one will be in touch with fellow students or leads who run such initiatives, so someone can easily be part of such an opportunity.
3. Engineer J Edison Abahurire, Lead — Facebook Circles, Kampala
We're privileged to host another Community passionate Speaker who shared about scholarship opportunities from Facebook in partnership with an online learning platform: OpenClassrooms which offers one of the best frontend web development courses, then data science and other courses that were to be conducted locally by on-ground mentors, he shared the link to registration and a number of students indeed registered.
He talked about OpenSource another way of contributing to the community and most important on an individual basis helps someone to learn as one collaborates with experts during the event. Am his community has held several meetups all geared towards open-source, for example the last concluded: Hacktctober Fest (which I took part of, and a number of juniors got to learn dev tools like git — Github)
4. Samuel Mugisha, ex-DSC Lead Muni University &Winner of 2019 DSC Global Solution Challenge
Samuel was also another inspiring fellow student who shared his story into the community, then joining DSC and how he managed to beat all other DSC chapter across the globe to win the Solution Challenge. Amidst his campus being far from the city where most communities base, he managed to coordinate with Mr.Opio as his mentor during the Solution Design Days with his team-ments which helped them emerge out with the best solution. He testified about the coordination he ensured which helped him make it.
More about Mugisha here…
5. (Me) Atwijukire Trevor, Lead — DSC Monaco Institute
Since Developer Student Clubs was a new word to many, I presented to them what it was all about and the expectations our leads had in us. Sharing about my journey into tech and then the community was another my must-talk about.
Finally, we had group photos that marked the official launch of the Club on the campus. Link to photos…
