From Graphic Design to Code Design: Desiree Bradish’s TripleTen Story

Desiree Bradish is, before all else, creative. Throughout every position she’s held, the process of producing something new has fueled her. Now, after exploring less lucrative options across different industries, she’s landed in tech, where her originality is earning what it’s worth.

Where she started

Desiree first got curious about tech while studying for her degree in media arts and animation. In fact, as a pet project, she built a game that brought together a community of nearly 15,000. “It was just such a really exciting and involved process.”

This gave her a strong foundation, but she decided to move on from it, first becoming an English as an additional language teacher and then working as an animator before landing a five-year career as a graphic designer. But as she sees it, it was a dead-end job. “You work long hours for bad pay.”

Then, the pandemic struck. She was furloughed.

Rediscovering a path

This fracture in her career gave her a moment to think. She had been working part-time, and she was unfulfilled. 

I was really just kind of reevaluating my life and deciding that I needed to refocus. Desiree Bradish, TripleTen grad

“I figured that by doing that, it’d set a good example for my nephews, and I just really wanted our family and myself to do better as a whole,” she says. 

That was when she remembered the game she built. “I’d enjoyed it. Not even the game stuff necessarily, but just learning how changing code made other things change, and then getting user feedback.”

She began exploring free training resources on programming, but the conversations she’d enjoyed when first coding were missing. In addition, she couldn’t track her progress, and she was never quite sure if she’d learned enough to start working. “That's why I started looking into bootcamps—because I wanted just a bit more direction and reliable advice.”

The selection was daunting. “There are a lot of Java bootcamps; there are Ruby bootcamps, Python bootcamps; there's everything, so I started looking through job ads. I tried to nail down the languages that were the most popular.” 

Through her research, she found that most job descriptions were looking for coders who knew JavaScript. Since that was a focus of TripleTen’s curriculum, she enrolled.

The whole stack that TripleTen offers is all in the JavaScript ecosphere, and it all fits together really well. It was highly sought after in a lot of jobs, so I decided that I definitely wanted to go in that direction. Desiree Bradish, TripleTen grad

A return to tech

At TripleTen, she found what she was looking for. “It's really well structured and organized. The first couple projects are HTML and CSS, but as you start to develop into JavaScript and learn to plug in these new technologies, you still work on a very similar project, and just expand it to show how you can grow the project using your new, different skill sets.” 

In addition, the community feedback she appreciated in college returned; code reviewers looked through the programs she was writing and helped her improve them.

As her time at TripleTen finished, she began looking for a job. The search lasted only four weeks. “I got really lucky. I got hired for almost the very first job I interviewed for. I wasn't in it as long as I thought I would be.”

The company first conducted a cultural interview and then assigned her a take-home task, which, according to Desiree, was extraordinarily easy. “Primarily, their decision to hire me was based on the skills that were presented in that take-home project. I just really nailed it down and made the structure nice, which I think TripleTen really emphasized.”

I felt prepared for all of the questions, and it was largely because of TripleTen. Desiree Bradish, TripleTen grad

“But I was like, ‘I feel like this is a setup. It can't go this well because, you know, everybody does hundreds of interviews,’” she adds.

The position she landed? It was an internship at Flexion, a company that upgrades online infrastructure for governments. So, instead of applying her creativity to penciling out characters and graphics, she started exercising it to shape the look and feel of systems that people rely on.

She didn’t last in that junior position for very long. Within a year, Flexion hired her full-time as a full stack engineer.

Our pitch to you

If you’re also a creative person looking for a bootcamp that will help you bring your knack for invention to a new industry, TripleTen can help. Check out the programs we offer and if you’re not sure which tech specialty to pursue, try our career quiz.

And if you want to hear Desiree in her own words, check out what she has to say on our podcast.