General Assembly alumnus story: From an event business owner to a software developer

Brought to you by General Assembly

Jade Lillo-Trynes, currently residing in Newcastle, New South Wales, was once a business owner whose company specialised in event-hiring and planning. Now she is a full-fledged software developer at one of Australia’s biggest companies, REA group. 

Her journey is one of the many success stories we’ve seen here at General Assembly (GA). Our students come from a diverse range of backgrounds hoping to carve out a meaningful and sustainable career in tech. In the case of Jade, she was looking to make that switch after the pandemic had impacted her business. So, bolstered by  the encouragement from her husband and friends, she went for it and applied for GA’s Software Engineering Immersive. 

GA: What inspired you to take a coding bootcamp?

J: When I started digging into it, I had never looked at code before and I didn’t know how it worked. It sounded very mysterious and something only for really, really smart people. It's definitely something that was very unknown.

I had really no experience with coding or anything to do with development at all until I would say, maybe three months before I decided to do the course. That was when I started exploring, and I downloaded a game to learn to code. I also did Dash, which is GA's free online coding course. I did that for a couple of months before I made the decision to pursue the bootcamp.

GA: What sets General Assembly courses apart from other tech courses?

J: My career coach was the best. Her advice was invaluable and a huge part of it all. I've known from the beginning that there was an element of career coaching at General Assembly. I think when you’re considering making such a big change, this is a really key thing –– it drew me to GA in particular over some other places that were offering similar tech courses. That was really attractive to me, and I would say, it made a huge difference. 

Doing a tech bootcamp was also more cost-effective. Within one to two years after graduation, you know you could move up to more of a mid-level role in the industry, and within three to five years you can become a senior developer. If I took a four-year degree at a university, I could be at a point where I'm already looking for senior roles and probably [earn] double to three times the amount of a fresh grad salary. So, it all made a lot of sense.

GA: What is the learning environment like at General Assembly?

J: Most people worked full-time on top of studying. Lots of them were in relationships. Some of them had children, and so the choice they made to put their time and money into the course meant that they were there to get a lot out of it. This really created a really cool learning environment as well.

I also got along really well with one of my instructors. Everybody has a different teaching style, and every student has a different learning style. I found the way he presented the course and its content really engaging. I found that he would push us a bit more. He would ask questions in the chat and make it a bit more interactive. So, I definitely enjoyed his teaching style and we've since stayed in touch. Actually, he also ended up referring me to my current company because he worked there. While he wasn't necessarily involved in the hiring process, he did refer me, which was awesome.

GA: What is life like after General Assembly? 

J: I joined a start-up, Coassemble, about six weeks to two months after I finished up with GA. It was a very different experience from REA now because I think the team was small and had around eight developers.

Right now, my team works on the RealEstate.com platform and it's a very large business with a huge audience. So I can take it quite slow in a way, as compared to where I came from before, [where] things were very fast. But when you have as many users and as much at stake as a huge company does, you have to make sure that you're really thinking things through. So there are some things like fixing bugs and … writing new features and doing a lot of testing of these features.

I went into an established team and established products to a point, so I was a bit nervous [as] to what it would be like working in the team, but a lot of the things I actually learnt and experienced at GA –– like the way that you write code in a team –– really helped me to adjust quickly.  

GA: What’s the one piece of advice [you’d give] students looking to do a coding bootcamp at GA? 

J: No [one] developer knows everything, because technology changes all the time, and every company uses a different tech stack. You have to be willing to learn how to do things, and that you can think about problems and come up with ways to solve them. These are skills you need to thrive.

At the end of the course, you will definitely be employment-ready, and you will be able to get a job at the end of it, if you want one. Yes, it will cost money. And yes, it is a time commitment. [But] it's worth the time and it's worth the money, because at the end of it … you are investing in yourself and in your future.