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Gabe Guio - Graduate Spotlight | Stories from the Hackery

Written by Jessica Grande | Mar 27, 2024

Before coming to Nashville Software School (NSS), Gabe Guio worked as a paralegal for the United States government after graduating from college. “That’s not where my passion was entirely,” he shares on the Stories from the Hackery podcast. “I’ve always been around computers [and] one of my best friends basically convinced me to just start coding.”

Gabe recalls writing his first line of code in Python before realizing the self-study route would only get him so far. “I realized [coding] wasn’t something I could really do myself, or I could but I felt like the learning curve was way too steep,” he reflects. “There’s so many different languages, there’s so many opinions about how you should get into the industry.” 

That’s when he searched for tech podcasts on Spotify and began listening to the now discontinued The Complete Developer Podcast series where an NSS alum was helping the hosts compare and contrast the different learning methods to gaining the skills needed for a career in tech when NSS was mentioned. “[Their guest] was just talking about NSS, and I checked out the website,” he shares. “I saw it was a nonprofit, I saw it was really put-together, there were a lot of great testimonies.” Gabe would soon after join a Jumpstart program, followed by a 9 month software engineering program at NSS. He is now graduated and looking for his first full-time opportunity in tech. 

Gabe recently volunteered with the local data conference, DataTune Nashville and not only built the website for the conference that serviced over 400 attendee registrations, but also a conference scanner application that sponsors used to capture the information of attendees as they visited sponsor tables for a raffle prize at the end of the day. 

In this episode of Stories from the Hackery, Gabe shares how he was connected with the team at DataTune Nashville and what tools he used to create the applications for the conference. 

Resources References in this podcast: 

Connect with Gabe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabeguio/ 

Gabe’s Conference Scanner App Walk-through: ((COMING SOON)) 

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

2:49 Gabe’s background before attending Nashville Software School

5:29 - Volunteering with Data Tune Nashville Conference

7:30 - Building the Website for Data Tune Nashville

11:39 - Building the Conference Scanner app for Data Tune Nashville 

17:44 - Gabe’s experience with the Nashville tech community

20:33 - Outro 

Listen now on Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.