Justin Gitlin and Bree Thomas from ModeSet gave us some valuable insight at the January Buzz. It was all about “transitioning roles” and wow, they’ve pulled together some really disparate experiences to be the amazing developers they are today! Justin, Development Leader at ModeSet and one of the “DevELLOpers” at ello.co didn’t love computer science classes. Shocker. Bree originally studied law before entering the digital project management/development world. Another shocker. These two have experimented, failed, succeeded, and learned a heck of a lot along the way in their career journey.

The two started working together at Factory Labs several years ago, and have moved on to ModeSet, a product consultancy/development firm. Justin combines his love of “creative” projects like “Oh Heck Yeah Denver” and his passion for music, with his skills in development, and credits that for his success today.

Bree is the most junior developer at ModeSet (joining after an intense course at Turing), but her previous experience of managing digital projects lends her insight into the client side of work. She’s taught several agencies about her methods for management, and sometimes she writes about them here.

All in all, they gave us fresh insights and confidence in the fact that even if we’re not working at our dream job right now, and thinking about transitioning roles, we should learn as much as we can no matter where we are at a given time so that when the timing is right we can connect all of our experiences and create a pretty great career/life/business for ourselves. Thanks guys! Very inspirational.