Treehouse Success Story: How George Lambert moved from a cubicle to his own company

George Lambert worked in a bank as a Python developer, mainly focused on numerical software engineering. He dabbled in web development in his spare time and knew that he enjoyed it, but he didn’t have the time to spend learning HTML/CSS. As the bank’s corporate culture grew tedious, he made a bold choice: He quit his job to pursue becoming a full-time web developer.

George signed up for Treehouse by chance, after finding it on Google. He was instantly hooked, finding the track/course/lesson/step structure incredibly addictive, and quickly found himself counting points and striving to rank on the Learning leaderboard on a regular basis. After three months studying full time on Treehouse, he found a job as a full stack developer at a startup called Uberated. During his time there, he kept up his Treehouse studies in the evenings/weekends and continued to progress.

The month after Uberated closed, George founded Lambert Labs, a Python-focused software-development agency in London, which has thrived in its first year. Their projects have included building the back end for a stealth music app, building a platform to help children to learn and write, and developing a testing suite for an investment platform. The company has a business account with Treehouse, so all of their hires go through the same intensive learning process.

What first encouraged you to learn to code and pursue a career in the tech industry?

Why have I pursued a career in tech? Because tech is all around me, and it fascinates me. It is now integrated into so many of the things we do: Communicating with friends, dealing with personal admin, tracking sports performance, distributing music/video, the list goes on. Working in tech is fun and incredibly fast moving — things change materially each year, and you have to keep up!

On top of this, I come from a mathematical background and have always enjoyed tackling logical problems. A lot of coding is about logic, so taking it up seemed to make sense!

What work were you doing when you started learning with Treehouse?

I was working as a Quantitative Analyst at Citigroup. My job was pretty much split down the middle: half mathematical modeling, half Python. I wanted to move away from numerical development and into web/app development, and wanted to learn some new skills quickly! Treehouse was the perfect platform for me.

Why did you choose to learn with Treehouse?

I chose to learn with Treehouse after shopping around for a few weeks. I tried both CodeAcademy and Udemy, but the bite-sized chunks from Treehouse seemed to be of the highest quality and crucially, enabled me to learn the quickest. I quickly became addicted!

How has Treehouse helped you with your career?

Treehouse enabled me to become a well-rounded developer. I am now in a position where I can tackle projects ranging from data science to backend development to database work, right through to making things look pretty on the front end.

Tell us a little about how your career has progressed since learning with Treehouse.

After completing my studies at Treehouse, I got a job as a full stack developer at a startup called Uberated. The idea of the company was to inject expert product reviews into retailer websites. In my second year at the company, I was promoted to CTO. However, as is unfortunately the case with some startups, it eventually fizzled out. After that, I founded my own software development agency, lambertlabs.com, based in London. Our team quickly grew to four members, and we now have a range of clients spread across different industries.

What would you say are the greatest benefits of working as a developer?

The main thing that I enjoy is the intellectual stimulus. As a developer, you really are learning huge amounts on a daily basis. The nature of tech means that languages and frameworks are constantly changing and it is our job as developers to keep up!

What has been the greatest challenge while learning to code?

The biggest challenge for me is a decision that bugs me every day: Which OS should I be using? MacOS? Ubuntu? Windows? The debate is still raging …

What advice would you give to aspiring developers?

Code, code, code. Practice makes perfect. The more code you write, the better you will get. Start with Treehouse’s online editor, then progress to a text editor, then finally to an IDE. Try to think of real/live projects that give you a reason to keep on coming back to them!

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You can check out George’s Treehouse profile here and say hello to him on Twitter.