Journal — July 24, 2026 · 4 min read
From College Side Gig to Founding Engineer — How I Started Earning in My Second Year
How I went from a broke second-year college student to a part-time founding engineer at a US startup — earning real money, shipping real code, and learning what classrooms don't teach.
Most people start their software career after college. Mine started in the middle of it — in my second year, when I was broke, restless, and tired of building tutorial projects that nobody used. This is the story of how a side gig became a founding-engineer role at a US startup, and why starting early changed everything about how I work today as a freelance web developer and app developer.
The broke-student beginning
Second year of college, and the math wasn't working. I wanted my own money — not for anything glamorous, just to stop depending on home and to afford the small freedoms a student never has. The obvious options were the usual ones. But I could code, and I had a laptop, so I started looking for anyone who would pay me to build things.
The first gigs were small and unglamorous — the kind of work you don't put on a portfolio but that teaches you the two things college never does: how to talk to someone who is paying you, and how to finish. Not "finish when it's perfect." Finish when it works, by Friday, because someone is waiting.
That's the part nobody tells students: your first paid work isn't about the money. It's about learning that code is a promise.
Travelfika — founding engineer, part-time, from a dorm room
In August 2022, while still in college, I joined Travelfika — a US-based travel startup — as a part-time founding engineer, working remotely with MongoDB, Node.js and the rest of the early-stack chaos that comes with a company being built in real time.
"Founding engineer" sounds like a title. At an early startup it's actually a job description that reads: everything is broken, there's no one else, figure it out. One week I was designing schemas. The next I was debugging production at midnight before a morning lecture. There was no senior engineer to escalate to — if I didn't fix it, it didn't get fixed.
Balancing it with college was exactly as hard as it sounds. Lectures by day, standups in the evening, code at night. I won't romanticize it — I was tired a lot. But I was also learning at a speed my classmates weren't, because my mistakes had real users attached to them.
What a startup teaches that college can't
You learn to carry the whole product. In a classroom you write a function. At a startup you own the feature — database, API, UI, deploy, and the 2am bug. That end-to-end ownership is literally what I sell today as a freelancer. I didn't learn it from a course; I learned it because a small company had no one else to carry it.
You learn that done beats perfect. College rewards the ideal answer. Startups reward the shipped one. A founding engineer who waits for perfect is a founding engineer who misses the market.
You learn to talk like a professional. Clients, founders, users — explaining technical tradeoffs to non-technical people is a skill, and it's the one that later decides whether you get hired as a freelance developer or passed over.
You learn money is real. Earning your own money as a student changes your relationship with work. It stops being abstract. You start thinking in value, not grades.
The compounding effect
That one year and one month at Travelfika did more for my career than any semester. It directly led to what came next — internships at Bosch, Sirma, and GyanGrove in 2024, then a full-time SDE role at Toolpioneers, and eventually going independent as a freelance developer in 2026. Every step was built on the proof from the one before.
Recruiters and clients don't ask about my GPA. They ask what I've shipped. The answer started in a dorm room in my second year.
If you're a student reading this
Start now, and start small. You don't need permission, a degree, or a "real" job title — you need one person willing to pay you for one thing you can finish. Take the unglamorous gig. Ship it. Let the work compound.
The students who wait to feel ready graduate with a certificate. The ones who start early graduate with a career already running.
That founding-engineer hustle is what I bring to every project today as a freelance web developer and app developer. Work with me — or read what came next: three internships in one year.