Le Wagon

I have been thinking about following Le Wagon bootcamp since the day I heard about it. All the people that knew about it were unanimous. So when my school offered me the possibility to follow The Wagon bootcamp as part of my last year of studies, I didn’t really hesitate.

All I can say is that I wasn’t disappointed. With all the expectations I had in the bootcamp, it still found a way to get me positively surprised.
I really was eager to learn about coding, it’s really the field of study that motivated me. I wasn’t really thinking about my career, or that it would look good on my resume, it was all about learning something that I find deeply passionating.

That is the thing with this bootcamp I guess, you find yourself in an environment that enhance that motivation. Everybody arounds you is also eager to learn and motivated (including the people actually working there). All the tools that Le Wagon developed are amazingly easy-to-use and help you get caught in the « game ».

So yes, it is an intensive bootcamp, but you learn so much, and more importantly maybe, you enjoy all the process. Once it is finished, it is really when I realized all the things that I have learnt, the new way of thinking that I developed. All the pieces put themselves together, it is a great feeling.
Also, Le Wagon’s ecosystem is impressive, all tech companies know about this formation and value it, it definitely opens many doors.

The formation is amazing, the environment is amazing, the network is also amazing. I would do it again without any second thought !

you would think the slogan is a bit cheesy for Le Wagon but they do in fact change lives. Mine was one of these, I would have never foreseen the amount of change that came into my life from taking a le wagon bootcamp.

It has been 4 months since the end of my bootcamp in lisbon. I have been working in a family office fintech startup in brussels for the past 3 and a half months. One of my colleagues for the bootcamp final project liked my work and recommended me to his CTO, I had the job interview the day after the final bootcamp day, they rest is history and I haven't looked back yet. I really enjoy what I do, too much maybe, you could say. The need to adapt and figure things out as you go and the availability of this type of information on the web makes it a very interesting market to work in. Where as before I would struggle to pick up basic notions on these topics now I like the challenge of having to figure something out without any prior knowledge. We are building test driven api endpoints for a big contract and porting the whole app to a more segmented frontend backend microservices style one and this will involve getting into many fields and topics to study. We are now looking into graphql for the ease of development it brings to the front end development and the centralization of the routing in the backend.

My background was slightly different than what you'd think would be a usual case of a student of a programming bootcamp, but it turns out a lot of people from different backgrounds are looking for things like this more and more. I would soon find this out when meeting the rest of the classmates. I was an ok student in high school, I did one year of economics college and just didn't like it so dropped out and went to work. It wasn't exactly as cut and dry as that, I was young and immature so a lot of this work involved more lying around and wasting away then actual work but suffice to say that I didn't have a degree and was bouncing around in low qualified jobs learning the ropes of life. at some point when I was 25 I got into cleaning up myself and my life so started to treat myself better, workout , read, etc. WHich led to being slightly obsessed about cooking healthy food which led me to cooking school and a small career as a cook. Worked in hotels, pop restaurants, coffee shops, all you could think of and even river cruises, all hard and challenging in their own way.

I did always have in the back of my mind that I wanted to quench an old thirst of learning programming since my teens, all of it seemed very fascinating to me. At one point whilst working for a vietnamese pop up restaurant I signed up to volunteer for web summit. Back up a little.. My brother is a tour guide and he once had a tourist in one of his tours that ran a bootcamp similar to le wagin in barcelona, with former big tech employees the whole nine. He later told me about it and that the guy was interested in hiring my brother as a salesperson for him in portugal, the deal was that if he could sell 9 of them the 10th was free. My brother always looking out for me told me he owl give me the tenth. I was immediately fascinated with the prospect of such a thing as a bootcamp for programming, it was the first time i learned about the concept. I researched it a little but it was eye gouging expensive so there was no way with those crap jobs I had that I would have any money for it anytime soon. SO i parked the idea and filled it down in recesses of my mind. Back to web summit, when your there to meet a bunch of different people especially as a volunteer, I got to talking with this one volunteer and he was like so what's a cook doing at web summit. I told him I was itching to get into tech and was eyeing this super expensive bootcamp in barcelona but would have to park it for now, he just told me dude, i'm doing this bootcamp right here in lisbon and its way more accessible and a really good company. This was when I found out about le wagon, he told me about the local discount and the location and really brought home to me how great the organization and flow of it was. He was a former lawyer in brazil and had really no tech background nd told me it was fine for all types.

As soon as I had a computer with internet connection in front of me I was researching about this new found discovery. I was hooked this was it I had to get into this, so then before next year's web summit I was already signed up for the fall bootcamp. The process was straightforward, I had to rush the interview tech challenge because I had a long trip planned to poland. Emily was super nice and made it very unintimidating, I paid the deposit and got the prepwork. It was a lot of prepwork but it was very important. I felt like I was paying for something I had been anticipating for along while and even though it was sometimes hard to grasp what I was learning in that prepwork I had to take it seriously and finish before the boot camp. I didn't take it with me to poland so when I came back 3 weeks before the bootcamp I was cramming all day and night. It's not something you can do in a week let me tell you, so take it seriously.

The program had a good mix of organization and support, that was the thing that most stuck out to me over the months. It was really quite surprising, Kitt which is the internal exercise system they have was really impressive. The markdown they used made it a pleasure to read the exercises, eventually I felt excited to tackle the daily exercises. I was hooked, but the balancing act that the team plays with skill is managing to maintain a relaxed atmosphere whilst expecting so much from the students. In a sense it is almost self paced at least for the duration of that day then it resets the day after. Beer and dinner friday, getting to know the rest of the colleagues with pair coding. The model of morning lecture and then the rest of the day with tackling the exercises is perfect. I really enjoyed it, I couldn't know really how much I really had anticipated it. I had gone in with an open mind and no expectations, at worst it would give me closure at best it would catalyze my change of life and direction. When it got to the final project we already knew each other all very well, pair programming and the dinners had made sure of that. So I presented my idea, like anyone else who wanted to, no one was forced to do it, if you had an idea you could otherwise whatever. The voting system for these projects was another really impressive thing done with some sorting algorithm based on a bunch of data, all very high tech and once all the talks were down we had our teams. Turns out I didn't really know my team but we had a great idea and that was the cool thing.

One of the team members, the one that would later recommend me to his boss. Worked for this startup and used trello but felt the need to get more visual feedback from it so that was the basis of his project idea, get more visual KPIs from a trello sprint board. All of these lingo was super foreign to me and even though I didn't know him I felt he had the most relatable real world idea. We had almost nothing to go with at the start, for almost half of the first week we almost did no coding just to figure out how we were going to get data from trello boards into our app. Straight from the go we were ambitious, we wanted to connect to trello api and get data from a aboard onto out app and then display it. Every step required a lot of fanning out from complete darkness and the unknown, from figuring out omniauth 2 factor authentication for trello. Reading through their documentation, we even landed on luck with a great ruby wrapper around the trello api which was very well written and thus a great lesson in ruby source code. Eventually we even tried to go beyond and get webhooks working that would send back to out callback endpoint any updates from the trello board, the glory and icing on the cake was having our team mate demo the app on trello, make some huge change in the cards and watch it change the statistics on our app. Very rewarding.

Conclusion, learn to code and change your life, go to Le Wagon.

After a year and a half as a business analyst in a tech start-up I felt like I had a good understanding of our business and market. However as many of us with non-technical background, I was clearly lacking a certain number of skills in order to understand the development of our core product. I told friends about my very early mid-life crisis and met with someone who convinced me to go for Le Wagon’s bootcamp in Paris despite not having coded anything in my life. After the first few days, the fear of failing had completely vanished - Le Wagon somehow found the perfect balance between supporting students and teaching them to reach the autonomy they’ll need as junior developers. You also get to meet with awesome people who you will want to train with every day. Le Wagon is a family with such a great spirit that you always find a way to come back for one of their many community events.
After the bootcamp, I left my business analyst position and I quickly learned Python to work in data analytics.

I wanted to learn how to code for a few years before I joined Le Wagon. I tried to learn it myself by following online courses a few times, but each time I didn't manage to continue after a few weeks of trying. I actually already gave up on learning how to code until someone told me about Le Wagon. People were telling me that you will be able to build products only after 2 months. I was a little skeptical, because it sounded crazy, but then after talking with a few alumni I decided to give it a shot anyway, I just wanted to become a more technical product manager.    The 2 months at Le Wagon were very intense. We were covering new topics everyday. It was overwhelming sometimes because you often feel you haven’t mastered the topics from the days before yet and you are already learning something new. Because everyone was in the same boat, we were able to help each other out and learn together. I think Le Wagon does it very well in selecting good teachers. Our teachers were able to make ‘boring’ topics fun, which makes it easier for us to understand. The last 3 weeks were project based, when we could build our own products with a team. For me this was the moment to apply everything we had learned and to experience how to work together in a tech team. Le Wagon doesn’t only focus on teaching students how to writing codes, they really prepare you to be problem solving in the tech world.    Now after the camp, knowing how to code and being part of the alumni group, I feel that many doors have opened. The 2 months flew by so quickly and I was able to learn so many things in such a short time. For the people who are considering to join the camp, focus for 2 months, it is definitely worth it. 

I had a very positive experience at Le Wagon bootcamp. Before the camp, I was the general manager of a consumer electronics distribution company, and I was looking to diversify my skills and knowledge in order to take the company to a higher level. There was never a dull moment in the camp as each hour of each day was engineered for maximum learning, and there were more days than not when I felt stretched way beyond the edge of my capabilities, but there is always support from staff and classmates so you can't get too lost. The camp culminated with 3 weeks of working in a team of 4, which was the most challenging and intense but also the most rewarding experience in the whole camp. We made an easy to use app to help seniors in China to get together and dance in the local parks, which has always been a popular national pastime but offline for the most part. Our team enjoyed working with each other so much, we remain good friends despite living in different countries and we will even compete in two hackathons this summer as a team. To others who are considering to join Le Wagon, I would recommend doing the pre-work 100% with all your focus. It's long, it's hard, but on week one everything takes off like a rocket ship and you want to have as much under your belt as possible before the 9 weeks journey begins.

The Wagon bootcamp has been a real achievement.
I didn't even expect heading to such a great experience when I signed in.
I'm pretty sure It's not necessary to talk about the content, just come over and take the most of it; no matter what you want to do next : becoming a web developer, a product manager, an entrepreneur or just for your own culture…
In fact, everything here is about sharing tech skills and experiences, especially because everyone here has a different background. The staff is amazing, from the first day to the last, you're never left alone. Moreover, thanks to a very sharp program, it's affordable to everyone to improve his skills step by step.
I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone!

The curriculum  and the material provided are amazing: easy to understand, sharp, straight to the point and always up to date.

 

The first day, was probably the third time opening a terminal in my whole life, by the end of the bootcamp I was merging pull requests on GitHub and pushing my PWA on Heroku.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, that is exactly why you should join the bootcamp.

 

Every day, I woke up wanting to go to class, wanting to learn…9 days straight, not so easy to have this motivation in University. And what is best is that you are surrounded by people that have the save anger to learn, paired with passionate teachers and TAs that are seriously there JUST because they love what they are doing. They are seriously amazing in understanding what is bugging you, how can they make it clearer, and they can repeat it 1000 times.

 

You will start with Ruby, and by the second week you will be playing black jack against your laptop, then you might wander ok cool… but when will I move from the terminal, and that’s when they will teach you the front-end and the beauty that is on all the apps you are surrounded by, and you have no idea how they got created (you will, promised). And from there they will teach you a MVP is built, and then it will be your turn and you will challenging yourself to create something that is actually out there, on the world wide web, and it feels immensely empowering.

 

After seeing engineers working their magic, I thought it would have been almost impossible for me to understand what they were doing… then I found le Wagon.

First of all, for the first time in Le Wagon history, ever we had majority female than male ratio in this batch :) 

Prior to attending Le Wagon bootcamp, I was working as a data analyst and data engineer in a mid-size e-commerce company. I studied information system in university, as I’ve always had huge interest in anything tech, but was too intimidated to take on a full computer science major then.

While working in the data team, I was exposed more and more to the IT and programming world, and was looking to finally brush my fear aside, and dive fully into the technical world. I was looking at different big data analytics or data science programs, but felt I wasn’t ready to commit to a full-time one-year-long master degree. So I thought of Le Wagon bootcamp as a shortcut!

It wasn’t an easy decision, because I’ve worked for years in data field, and I felt like doing the full-stack coding bootcamp is a quite a big shift. But I think I stopped thinking of this after day 3 of the bootcamp.

I really enjoyed every single day of the camp, the instructors we had were really some of the most amazing, talented and passionate people in the industry, and they really tried to put down the textbook, and do lectures in the most entertaining and unconventional way! The format of the classroom is great, we’d have 1 - 2 hours lecture in the morning, and right after that we’d start doing our daily challenges with our buddy of the day.

I must say they’ve really found a way to teach non-technical people into building a full web product. Instead of looking at it as “learning how to code”, which can be demotivating sometimes when you feel like your brain is just not capable, they guide you pass the coding and straight on to the end goal: to launch a web product, YOUR own product, in just 9 weeks time. I remember what an awesome feeling it was, when we started being able to put the backend side and the frontend side together to complete a full product.

The bootcamp has really opened my eyes and a new path for me. At this very moment, I'm enjoying just coding and creating new products everyday, and it gives me freedom to work as a freelancer and getting involved in different startups. I still very much love data, and I think the skill I learned at the bootcamp boost my capability in different data engineering projects that I wasn't able to do before the camp.

Last but not least, Le Wagon has such an amazingly tight community of alumni and teachers, and these people are there to help each other post-bootcamp, whether to help with programming questions, or to give advice on projects and career, or to just share freelance opportunities with fellow graduates.

I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone!

I graduated as a Software Engineer in Belgium but before committing myself to a full-time job I wanted to have an experience abroad. So I joined batch #210 in Montréal and it was the best experience of my life!

Before the bootcamp, I wasn't sure if I was going to learn anything in the first couple of weeks, because those were all about the basics of programming. But boy was I wrong! My prior knowledge of coding gave me the opportunity to learn how to explain stuff that seems easy to me, to someone who never heard of it prior to the morning lecture of that day. And that definitely helped me to improve as a programmer. The bootcamp also provides optional challenges which are quite challenging, even for programmers with experience.

But as the weeks progressed, I realized that Le Wagon is about so much more than just coding. The bootcamp taught me a lot about teamwork, helping each other out, realizing what you don't know and how to let others help you with what you don't know. And most importantly it taught me how to transform an idea into a product you can proudly present in only 2 weeks with people you've only known for 1,5 month. That's the magic of Le Wagon!

Le Wagon has been an awesome experience. The teachers have been amazing and unbelievably supportive, I could slack them night or day and I know they would get back to me. As a future student, I’ve found Le Wagon to be a great step before University, the bootcamp has made me not only think more about what career I would like to do in the future but also think more about the business side of life. I now feel more like I’m learning with a purpose than just learning because I love the subject, which massively increases my motivation to learn about what I love. Post Le Wagon, I feel more prepared for life at University, the Le Wagon mentality is ‘work hard, play hard’ and that’s the philosophy I intend to take with me to University.