Le Wagon

I lived in the US for 9 years were I pursued my undergraduate degree in Business and later on my MBA and Master's in Science of Finance. After 2 years of experience in the steel industry I worked in process management and business development for a private business group dedicated to Retail and Real Estate (3 years) were I got to travel to places like: Portugal, Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland, Ireland, China and Hong Kong.

Joining Le Wagon has been the best decision I have made and would advice a younger me to have joined this industry years ago. Now that I'm a FullStack Programmer I can freelance, join any industry or startup I want.

The community of Le Wagon is friendly, collaborative and connected to high-profiles that can open doors everywhere. Lose the tie, put on your Nike's and come join Le Wagon.

Since I always had enjoyed cooking at home I decided to try myself in the culinary arts industry as a side income while studying. Ever since that day my life was all knives and flames, scars and stress for the most part of the year except the wakeboard instructor job I had in summers when I could recharge my self again for upcoming part of the year in the kitchen. I had always been determined and unafraid of hard work so I quickly excelled from cook to chef in small but interesting places, restaurants and projects.

As the years passed on, the novelty of my career faded, the urge to prove myself in the kitchen became pointless, and it became increasingly hard to understand or justify the choices I had made. At some point, I realized 10 years of culinary experience on my resume could only lead to 10 more years of culinary experience and  60+ hour work weeks in the kitchen  was something I did not want to tolerate any more.

So last year I quit my job abandoned my plans to go to culinary school in Italy to become a master chef of Italian cuisine and I set off on a journey of self-discovery that lead me to code. I started to learn from online courses by myself but since coding was something completely new to me and there are so many deferent things you can learn I needed some kind of basic structure where to start from. So searching in google lead me to LeWagon page. I immediately found a lot of amazing reviews about this boot camp and as I wanted to meet like-minded people and learn as fast as possible this looked like perfect opportunity to kick-start my career as a developer.  So I enrolled in LeWagon coding bootcamp in Amsterdam.

So about the LeWagon in Amsterdam-

Usually people have the image of coders as boring, lonely, weird people who spend their days in front of screens and don’t want to communicate with others, but in Le Wagon you see that coding actually can require a lot of collaboration with diverse group of amazing people, with different age, backgrounds, experiences, nationalities and you all work to gather as equals to learn and create something amazing.

Overall experience was nothing short of incredible. I’ve probably never learnt so much in such a short time. Every day you are surrounded by inspiring teachers that are there to help when you hit the wall. In nine weeks you learn a solid introduction to all the necessary tools you would require to reach a productive level, how to put them all together, and how to collaborate in team and make MVP product from scratch in 7 days. There is almost no time to rest. It’s difficult but completely worth it!

Be aware that the bootcamp will not do the work for you. To get anything out of it, you’ll have to give it your full commitment. So if you are planning to do this, the main thing to get the most out of it is to prepare your self properly. Do all the prework that is given by the LeWagon and do it twice if possible. Take a vacation and try to arrange everything so you don’t get much distraction during the 9 weeks. Prepare your self physically as well - be in good health, well rested.

If you are looking for bootcamp experience then LeWagon is the one!

P.S.

After bootcamp I went back to my home country Latvia and started to apply for jobs. I was looking something ruby or frontend related. All the frontend positions where asking for PHP knowledge so I started to learn that. After a month and a half of actively applying, doing test works and going to some job interviews I finally found a job opportunity that I really was excited about - frontend developer in a digital agency that is one of the best in Latvia. Long story short - two days after my job interview I got the job as a junior web developer. Right now it is the end of my second month there. All the knowledge I gained in LeWagon is a huge help in learning and understanding the new work environment - cause right now I’m working with php Laravel. So my recommendation - if you find a job opportunity that makes you excited and by description, it may be over your skill level, but you still know you want it - go ahead and apply for it - you still could get it!

I decided to pursue a career in coding after almost of decade of having an interest but never taking the leap. I started researching bootcamps about a year before actually enrolling. Once I discovered Le Wagon and read it's mission, I knew it was the right choice for me. I Immediately enrolled for Batch #144 in Montreal.

I have BA in Anthropology and I worked as a research internship coordinator before coming to Le Wagon. You absolute do not need to have a maths or coding background, although a large amount of commitment and motivation is required. Le Wagon has quenched a thirst I had for challenging myself. It is intense program that pushes you to your limits in the best way possible. The support system in place is well thought out and geared towards ensuring that each student will find their flow and to provide the resources needed.  I am now brushing up on skills learned, creating my own portfolio, and will hopefully begin freelancing in the near future. 

When I started with Le Wagon for Batch 144 in Montreal, QC I had a career as a Head Chef/Baker that I was starting to get very tired of after 10 years. I had been taking University Classes for Game development that did not seem to be getting me where I wanted to go and that’s when I researched coding boot camps in my area and found Le Wagon. 
I was amazed at what I became a part of after that. A community that my online classes could never give me, along with the hands-on teaching that would give me a true understanding of what I was programming.
I remember looking at job posting for web development and seeing the list of languages and libraries, thinking to myself how in the world you learn all of those and now I look at those lists and feel confident in going into interviews and discussing each item on that list. 
Right out of the boot camp I had two interviews with companies and one being from a recruiter from LinkedIn that because of this boot camp wanted to recruit me. Along with the interviews, I create my own projects and am starting to do freelance, successfully completing my career change.

I used to be a graphic designer with strong knowledge of print media and marketing. I had made website designs and prototypes before and had worked on the visual side of web applications. I knew some HTML and CSS, but I had never any experience with the servers and backend part of the projects. Never had I opened Terminal before.

At the age of 39, I felt that I had to make a change.

Learning how to code is to our generation the same as was learning how to read and write to people two hundred years ago - the illiterate ones will never catch up with the faster ones in their career.

So I looked for the best coding bootcamp in Europe and came across Le Wagon. The reviews were so good that I decided to apply. 

After graduating from batch no #124, I can assure you all that the positive 5-star reviews do not lie. It really is just as good as it reads!

The curriculum is excellent and its web-based online learning environment is super-useful. There is so much to explore and it's being updated on a daily basis. I still use it regularly to find answers to my coding-related questions today.

The teachers are very professional, confident, natural talents - all of them. My favourite was Alice. She just kept the whole thing together and was such an inspiration. On our final project week she spent hours trying to restore my petty Javascript animation. Not because that it was such an important feature, but because I as a student had worked so hard on it and she thought it was important.

In addition to teachers, there are a number of assistants. You will get as much help as you ask - they are there for you all the time. They sit long hours with you solving a problem and later relax together with you and have a beer. Very, very positive vibe indeed.

What I liked the most, was the product-centered, entrepreneurial mindset an bias of the curriculum - we had product pitch sessions and brainstorms and everyone, who wanted, had a chance to shine.

Surely the best thing about Le Wagon, is the large, worldwide community of like-minded entrepreneurial, helpful cool people that you will have a connection with after graduating.

Everyone is always invited back for demo days and cocktail nights to have a good time together.

Five stars out of five. Period.

En 9 semaines @Le Wagon Marseille, on apprend à coder mais pas que …
    
    Marseille, la belle cité phocéenne, où le climat annuel est chaud, ce qui nous permet de valoriser nos jolies calanques …
    Marseille où ses habitants sont des gens au top du top avec lesquels il est sympa de prendre l’apéro en jouant aux fléchettes ou alors en regardant la meilleure équipe du monde : l’OM …
    Marseille où il est désormais possible d’apprendre à coder !?

#     Oh l’enc ….

    OUI, grâce au Wagon et à son staff autant pédagogue que formidable il est désormais possible pour quiconque d’apprendre les bases du code. 
    Alors, OUI il faut vivre cette expérience pour y croire.

    Je n’avais jamais codé une seule ligne de code avant le Wagon et pour être tout a fait franche je n’y connaissais rien du tout, et à présent je me surprends à coder tout ce qui me passe par la tête.

    En 9 semaines au Wagon Marseille, j’ai appris les langages : Ruby / Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, mais je me suis également fait pleins de contacts et d’amis.

    Le Wagon est à l’humain ce que le Ruby est a l’objet, je recommande cette formation pour tout ce qu’elle m’a apporté autant d’un point de vue compétences que d’un point de vue humain.

Alors OUI changez de vie et apprenez à coder grâce au Wagon Marseille.

Prior to Le Wagon I was a Management Consultant in a firm specialising in technology projects, where I had worked with web developers in non technical roles such as business analyst. I found working with them very enjoyable, but always felt held back by my lack of technical knowledge, so decided to dedicate some time to complete a full stack web development bootcamp.

I chose Le Wagon due to its excellent reputation and online reviews and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. The teaching and course structure were excellent. The course is intense and challenging, but worth it - I’ve learned far more than I ever imagined. The teaching staff are fantastic and it was great to work with other students from different backgrounds and countries.

I also really enjoyed the entrepreneurial focus of Le Wagon and working as a team on two projects built in the final weeks of the course. I am confident now building MVPs, and perhaps more importantly, Le Wagon has equipped me with the knowledge and skills to continue learning.

In December of 2017 I graduated from a coding boot camp in Shanghai, China. To say that it was a life changing experience is to understate the degree to which new opportunities presented themselves, both professionally and personally within in span of four months.

            For me, going through the boot camp had been a long time in the making. I had been an English teacher for a year in Shanghai, and then started working as a recruiter for the company I had been teaching with. The job started out ok, but I found myself dedicating 70-80 hours per week. After four months on the job, I began to see what few opportunities lie ahead: I could improve my administrative skills related to collecting applicants’ documents and climb the corporate the ladder within the HR department, or transfer to another department. At the time, I had no hard skills, so I would have been restricted in my options, most likely writing content for our various products.

            The prospects were not good and I did not have a strong sense of hope in my career as it stood. I was essentially offering my ability to use the English language to write content, or improve how organized and efficient I could be to serve the benefit of the corporation I was working for.

            On New Years Eve 2016, I met and made friends with someone who just arrived in Shanghai and was working as a developer for the same organization. He was making nearly 3 times my salary and had enough free time to get to know the city. He had begun his journey as a developer through a well-known coding boot camp in the US. That is when the idea started floating in my head and sticking.

            Fast-forward 9 months into my job and I had had enough of the ambiguity. I left my position as a recruiter to return to teaching with the goal of getting back time to myself to prepare for joining a boot camp as soon as possible. The problem was that there were no English-speaking coding camps around. I started toying with the idea of going back to the US and nearly did, until I found out about Le Wagon. Originally started in Paris France in 2014, it began expanding quickly with locations in over 30 countries as of May 2018.

The Plan:

My intention from the get-go was to find a job as a developer, either freelance or full-time after the camp. I had spoken with several developers that I knew personally and decided that I wanted to be skilled in front-end development, with a focus on JavaScript.

To be able to enact any plan, you need to have a financial runway. With the amount of money saved, I had roughly four months to find sustainable employment, which was either a full-time job or freelance gigs that would lead to more. This was Plan A. We graduated in early December 2017, so my runway was until about March 2018.

Plan B was return home to the US and continue to job hunt from my parent’s home. I did not want to return to the US, but it was a realistic Plan B. I refused to take on any job that was not strictly development because that is the skill I intended to grow, even if I had to do it from the US.

The Beginning of Camp (and a reassessment):

            So camp begins and after a few weeks, I am humbled. Coding is a lot more difficult than I initially expected. I start to question if working as a developer is really for me. Some of the students who were in my batch had a background in engineering or had taken some computer science courses were doing pretty well.

Development is very heavily front-loaded with information. Once you can get over the initial hump of learning how all the pieces fit together, things start to make sense quicker. Even though it is tough, something in the back of my mind just tells me that I will be working as a developer. Regardless of how it is going to happen, it is going to happen.

This particular camp is great because we visited several different firms around the city where we may be able to work after graduation. One meeting that boosted my motivation halfway through camp was at a startup accelerator. I met the founder of a company that had graduated from that accelerator about a year prior. One of his products is similar to the product I worked on for the boot camp’s final project, so I ended up interviewing with them for a project manager role but decline it because I was looking to code, period.

            Finally the end of camp rolls around and we present our products. It was a really exciting day to be able to show off what we have built. The next day, here I am – jobless and ready to take something on. During the final two weeks, I spent a lot of time focusing on the final project, so I did not follow up with the contacts I had made during the camp.

 On the first day after camp, my self-assessment of my skills is lower than I expected. I found that it was difficult to set accurate expectations on what my skill level would be post-camp because my knowledge-base was initially low.

I spent the first month after camp following up with potential employers and coding. Every day I coded for 7 hours through an online course that I had purchased to help me learn React.

A month after camp ended, I was able to land a full time job as a developer with a startup through the accelerator that Le Wagon had taken us to.

50% of the value that you get from a coding camp is the network that it has in place. Especially in the early days of your career, your network is key to getting paying gigs, whether they are freelance or full time. I am very happy with the value that Le Wagon’s network has been able to provide.

They also have a healthy habit of bringing back students from previous batches to talk about what they are doing now, T.A.-ing, and even lecture as teachers.

Overall, I am very happy with the change in my career since I went through the boot camp. Time is flying by at this point with each batch that comes and goes. Being able to reflect on my time at the camp and seeing other students who are now going through the same steps has helped me view the experience in a more holistic way and be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses with more clarity.

Amazing curriculum. Very organized lectures. Fantastic teachers. While most bootcamps focus primarily on career, essentially training you to be a cog in a machine, Le Wagon approaches their curriculum by focusing primarily on product development. They teach you how to create a great product, while teaching you all the tech you will need to get it done. 

I can honestly say that after one session at LeWagon, you will have a toolkit ready to build a saas platform immediately upon graduation. No exaggeration. 

If you are reading this post, you probably know that the slogan for Le Wagon is “change your life learn to code”.  It sounded like a platitude to me, at least it was how I felt before joining the camp. However, before I realized it, Le Wagon experience actually changed my life. During the camp, not only did I learn the foundation of coding, but it also helped build up my confidence. This confidence allows me to continue learning more advanced coding challenges independently even after the camp. In addition, Le Wagon helps me to connect to different tech communities which helps me to gain insights on the different tech sectors. More importantly, I met a group of new friends who share common interests, and join hackathons together. Therefore, I would proudly recommend Le Wagon to my friends

Before Le Wagon I worked as a project and event manager. During my career, I became frustrated with all the manual processes of the work and the time they took. These sort of processes leave event managers stressed along with a great deal of additional work. I constantly looked for ways to resolve this problem for my offices but soon realised it was possible, through technology, to change the whole industry. This is when I seriously started looking to become a dev.

It can be overwhelming looking for bootcamps as there are so many, I chose Le Wagon as it had the best reviews. For me, the most important thing was that I secured a job after the course, as I quit my job to make the change of career. At first I wasn’t sure that I made the right decision but as soon as my first day was over I knew that I had made the right choice. Not only were the teachers very helpful but they are extremely knowledgeable. They will ensure you understand what you are doing and will go above and beyond by answering questions, even after hours.

The way the course is set up is extremely thought out, it allowed me to work autonomously but still had me feel supported. The course is very intense but completely worth it and I can say that signing up to the course is the best choice I have ever made! I am so proud of myself, of what I have learned, my project but mostly that I can now work as a dev. It is really something I am be proud of.

I have never been happier with my career and it is all because of Le Wagon. I cannot recommend it more.

Now, six months after camp and six months into freelancing as a web designer & developer, it’s hard to believe that this time last year I didn’t know how to write even one line of code. So how did I get to where I am now? I know it might sound overdramatic, but I feel like there was my life before Le Wagon, and my life after Le Wagon, and both feel worlds apart.

Life Before Le Wagon

After graduating from university in my hometown, Montreal, Canada, I moved to Beijing, and then subsequently to Shanghai in 2015 when I started working as a buying assistant for a luxury fashion multibrand. After about a year and a half, I started itching for something with a little more responsibility and creative freedom, so when the opportunity to join a founding team on a fashion startup arose, I jumped on it.

Working at this startup was an intense and valuable experience for me, and acting as the product manager, one of my responsibilities was to manage the tech team building our main product. Out of all my duties, I found communicating and managing the tech team to be the most difficult, or at least the one task I knew that I could definitely improve at. In an effort to learn more of anything within the tech space, I attended one of the Le Wagon public workshops “How to Build a Landing Page in 2 Hours”. I loved it! I was so fascinated by how a few lines of code could translate into my own website (an ugly one, but still a website!). The workshop is how I discovered Le Wagon and I told myself that if ever I had a gap in work, I’d join the bootcamp.

Sure enough, a few months later, the start up didn’t work out and instead of looking for a new job straight away, I decided to join Le Wagon and develop my tech skills so that I could become a more experienced and knowledgeable product manager/start-up founder/fashion e-commerce owner/insert-whatever-job-title, seeing as tech experience would only help in any of the potential future jobs I could think of for myself.

Life During Le Wagon

I started the 9-week bootcamp in October 2017. The first few weeks were hard. We were learning Ruby and as I found some things logical, I found most things too abstract for my visual mind. It was a lot of frustration and a lot of reminding myself to be patient and do my best. In fact, dealing with frustration (which really is just learning how to learn, find answers, and unfrustrate yourself), patience, and doing your best, ended up being some of the most important takeaways for me from the camp, and are probably the most applicable now after I’ve graduated as well.

For those who don’t know the Le Wagon structure, every morning we have a lecture for 1-2 hours, and the rest of the day is spent working on practical exercises with a partner paired at random. This course set up is designed to replicate the real world, and is what strengthened all of our abilities to learn how to learn tech. What does that mean? We don’t get fed answers, the same way that would never happen after you graduate. First, we must try and find solutions to issues on our own, then by asking our partner, then by writing a ticket online calling for help to one of the teachers or TAs as you would in a tech forum like Stack Overflow.

Apart from the rigorous training, Le Wagon also set up various talks and company visits that we were incredibly lucky to get the chance to be a part of. I very quickly realized that Le Wagon is much more than a bootcamp, it's a far-reaching community and network of helpful, intelligent, and passionate individuals. The community and network aspect is the biggest contributor and reason I was able to move into freelance so seamlessly right after camp.

Life After Le Wagon

Time since finishing Le Wagon has flown by, but in a good way. After a much-needed break and visit back home at the end of camp, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d look for a new full-time job, or end up pursuing freelancing. I decided I’d return to Shanghai and freelance as I look for a new job, but the day after returning, one of my good friend’s from camp who had gotten hired by a startup company as a developer got me a freelance project with his company doing front-end work. This snowballed into a second project, and then a third, and then I soon had little to no time (or desire) to look for a full-time job anymore.

I’ve definitely learned the pros and cons of freelancing over the last few months, and have constantly had my boundaries pushed, but that’s what has forced me to learn and grow post-camp. Most importantly, as was so valuable during camp, the Le Wagon community and network has been the biggest change in my life. Not only do I have all this new knowledge that opened a completely new realm and sea of opportunity, but I also have these incredible supportive peers, many of which have become some of my closest friends.

A year ago I would have never believed I’d be doing what I do now, and now I can’t believe that I didn’t know much of anything about tech a year ago. Like I said, I feel like there was my life before Le Wagon and now there is my life after.