

Sometimes you just have to start. There are so many ābuffer stepsā that often get in the way between zero and one. There are so many excuses you can make for why you canāt learn something or canāt make it to the gym. Starting is a guaranteed way to bring about some sort of change in your life (for better or worse).
Gavin, as youāll find out, embodies what it means to be a self stater. Check this out.
Hi, Iām Gavin Dinubilo. I went to school in Reno at Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC). Iāve worked at a handful of places including TMCC, a startup in Reno, Pearson (yeah, the myMathLab folks), and a small shipping company. Nowadays Iām building out ideas, developing front ends for side projects, and writing front end code for a startup in San Francisco.
TMCC was a really nice school, it had a lot of opportunities for me, like internships and jobs. The classes were decent too, they laid a good ground floor for programming and many of the teachers were always open to helping if I had questions to go to the next step. The most valuable thing I learned was how to fail. I wasnāt the best student, and so because of this I failed a few classes during my tenure at TMCC. Ultimately I learned that these failures werenāt the worst thing to happen, and they havenāt really slowed me down in getting to where I am currently.
The main things that I think people donāt know is that itās not just for degenerates or students who couldnāt get into a 4-year school. Majority of the students that go there were also taking classes at the local 4-year school also. Theyād take their core classes at the community college, where it was sometimes half the price and occasionally youād have the exact same teacher youād have at the big school. Thereās also infinitely less costs to go to a community college, I didnāt have to take out any loans, and am now debt free after college.
I started building things when I was 15 at TMCC, and started learning to code the semester before my 11th grade year. I went to a hybrid high school for my junior and senior years that was at TMCC, so I was taking High School and college classes at the same time, so I had the unique opportunity to learn programming at a young age from college professors.
I found people to work with mainly from putting my own projects out there, and often times people will reach out to me asking to work on another project with them. Itās been the best way to find cool things to build. This works especially well when my partner can take over roles that Iām not exactly great at, for example marketing/design. Iām terrible at those two things (getting better though), but Iāve often found people that stand out in those areas and will trust me to handle development.
Iām most proud of Templates for Gmail. As it stands now, it has 1250 upvotes on Product Hunt, and over 4,000 users. The story behind Templates for Gmail is kind of unique, it was the first project Jordan Gonen and I had worked on after over a year of wanting to build something together. Jordan had reached out when I launched SāMore on PH asking if I wanted to build something. I never thought it would be Templates for Gmail, but Iām very glad it was. The reason Iām most proud of this, over something like SāMore or Volume or Blade or any of the other things Iāve build, is because of how quickly we put it together. It kind of proved to me that as long as you have a decent idea and execute on it, you can build something that people want.
An issue I had when I first started building things was trying to learn everything before actually building it. For example, when I started building Songfari, I knew nothing about Rails or how to even build a streaming music webapp. Instead of just trying to build it, I spent at least three weeks researching how to build it. In that amount of time I probably could have had an MVP out and asking people what they think. When youāre first starting out, I think itās ok to have shitty code, sooner or later theyāll manifest into decent code, and maybe someday (still hoping) itāll turn into beautiful code.
I think one of the best things you can do to build your personal brand as a developer is to release open source projects. They donāt have to be great, even just little things that solve a single problem. Open Source projects help to build credibility around yourself and give people examples of code they can read through.
In the same idea, I built Jam Api, which is a small website scraper using css queries. I started to build Jam Api because I needed it, but ultimately finished it is because other people needed it. I had found a market of people that needed something similar, and posted to the main forum of those people, which was Hacker News in this case, and now Jam Api has nearly 1.4k stars on Github and pretty much got me my job I have currently.
Donāt be afraid of failing on a project. The best lessons Iāve learned have come from projects that I had to quit because they just werenāt working. For example, I think Songfari would have succeeded if we hadnāt lost momentum. I wouldnāt have really learned this unless I had actually failed to keep consistent momentum on Songfari.
Honestly, and this is shitty, terrible advice for anyone else, but I wouldāve left college. I donāt think I got much out of it, it sure as hell didnāt get me a job, and didnāt come up in my interview one bit. Community college is great, but maybe not for a CS degree. To be truly honest I think my time at TMCC wouldāve been better spent pursuing a business development degree or something else that was completely boring to my 15 year old self. So, if dropping out is not a possible thing to change, I would change the degree I got in school.
I donāt think college is the right decision for everybody. I have many friends who went to 4-year schools and are now thousands of dollars in debt with no promise of a high paying job. If you absolutely have to go, but have no way to pay for a large majority for it, maybe try community college and try to find a major that interests you, and make sure your credits from there transfer to your 4-year school of choice.
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Where can people find you and what opportunities are you looking for? (Twitter, linkedin, personal site, medium, etc).
http://twitter.com/gavindinubilo
Originally Published on Student Hustle
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