Le Wagon

It might be cliché but doing Le Wagon Montréal truly changed my life. Before the course, I was not working or studying anything related to coding or computer science. I came from a background of hockey refereeing, sound engineering and video editing. After completing Le Wagon Montreal’s 9 week coding bootcamp, I am still working and improving upon the final project we built in the last 2 weeks of the bootcamp.  I learned how to build a website from scratch in just 9 weeks and now I’m using those skills to keep building the website for my business: zebrasclub.com. I also met a lot of incredible people because of the Wagon Talks, which provided access to entrepreneurs and influential people in the Montreal tech industry. That being said, the most important part of my experience is that I met great friends from around the world, and we continue to collaborate on my projects as well as theirs.

I have a degree in Humanities, and an assorted professional background in customer service, tourism, teaching, and NGO work. I spent the past 10 years moving around countries and continents, enjoying every job and place a fair bit, but never feeling completely satisfied with what I was doing. I didn’t dislike any of the jobs, but at the same time I felt stuck and like I had already plateaued. I’ve always loved (using) technology, so I’d been eyeing coding for a few years and started several free online classes, but even though I always enjoyed the coding itself, the online courses never really stuck. I just felt like the tech world was so distant from everything I was, that I always ended up slightly lost and discouraged, with no idea what to do next. I know that some people are fine learning like that from scratch, but for me it wasn’t working. I did really, really want to learn, but I felt like I needed something more concrete to start from, a network and solid basis, and Le Wagon gave me just that!

The course in itself was great. It is overall well thought out, you get a bunch of theory in the first three weeks (which I personally loved...not everyone does, and it is not always easy to understand why you are learning it during those first weeks, but it is so useful to have those basics later on even if you don’t remember all of it, trust me!), and then you learn how to actually make things that work and are useful! My final group project was a web app to connect refugees with potential employers in their new countries, so I learned how with coding I can still make things that are connected to my, completely different, professional background and personal interests. Everyone is a tech person, and everything can be made better with tech!

Apart from the curriculum, the most important part for me was the support of the teachers and TA’s, and the rest of the group. I think at Le Wagon they understand that group unity is important to make the learning easier, so there is a special attention to that. I truly felt supported by everyone all the way through, and that made a huge difference on the hardest days when none of my code seemed to be working!
Another great thing at Le Wagon is that they know and believe that you don’t need a previous background in tech to learn coding! Everyone who gets in has the ability to learn this skill, and you will always be reminded of it if you ever feel bad about your pace of learning! Remember that it is a massive amount of work and learning done in 9 weeks, so you will feel overwhelmed often. There wasn’t a single person in my batch who didn’t go through at least a few days of learning hell (I had way more than a few ;) ). Just run with it, let the adrenaline carry you (but don’t forget to sleep and have fun during the weekends as well), and you’ll see that all those hours will eventually amount to something, even if it seemed like you weren’t achieving anything at the time!

My advice is to definitely do the bootcamp if you want to learn coding, and don’t worry too much about the immediate results. You’ll have all the learning materials available forever to practice and learn better, and professional developers have to look things up all the time anyway! It’s not about memorising data. Put in the hours of work, talk to the teachers, support your classmates, and you’ll come out of it with tons of inspiration, a new mindset, a new approach to work and learning, and a complete new understanding of coding.

I still have A LOT to learn about coding, but before Le Wagon I felt intimidated by it, like a small club I wanted to get into but wasn’t cool enough for. Now I feel like I’m already part of it, I know how to learn, I sort of know what I’m doing, and can’t wait to do more of it! I am excited (rather than scared) about my professional future for the first time in years, and that alone was worth all the bootcamp hours in the world!

I was a college freshman with an interest in computer science before I joined Le Wagon. I have minimal knowledge, however, about coding and project management before the bootcamp.    I really enjoyed my time at Le Wagon---there were so many things to love about this program. First and foremost, I learned a lot in this two months. The experience of mastering Ruby on Rails, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in two months was a hell of fun. The learning curve was steep and the workload was heavy, but somehow the mentors made the learning process challenging as well as entertaining.    After this bootcamp, I got so many opportunities open up to me. The alumni group has job postings nearly every day. I got an internship at a tech consulting company right after the bootcamp. Moreover, our projects with NGO in the last two weeks also inspired me to start a club at my school, using what I learned in this bootcamp to help local non-profits achieve their goals.   Last but not least, the people at Le Wagon were 120% inspiring. Every one of the people I met in this two months has some exciting life stories to share, they were the kind of people that you would love to grab a coffee or pull an all-nighter with. Working with people from around the world with different experience also taught me how to be a better team player and how to communicate effectively.   I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone who wants to learn new things, meet passionate people, and build cool shits.          

Hi, I am Florent and I’ve been studying at le wagon last summer during 2 months. It has been an incredible experience and I did not mind for a second trading sunny holidays for a 2 month intense coding experience. 

I graduated 2 years ago from a french business school and then lead operations in a startup in Paris. I wasn't a tech guy even if I usually had to deal with tech issues in my previous job. But no coding experience. 

During 9 weeks, I’ve been able to: 

- Get skills in Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML/CSS, SQL : I am now working as a UX Product and Web Developer. Which means that after Le Wagon, I am able to lead a basic RoR website. I still need to improve my coding skills to build complex applications but Le Wagon gave me the tools and knowledge I need to be able to level up on my own. (i.e. during the bootcamp you build an Airbnb-like which is considered as a basic app)

- Learn from amazing teachers : Teachers are part of Le Wagon community and they are really good and very dedicated. You can feel their common will to push you moving forward everyday.

- Meet awesome friends : I am currently making projects with friends from my batch. It was a good opportunity to meet persons that share same interest.

- Be part of Le Wagon community : which gather thousands of great guys all around the world ready to help you.

If you want to build a MVP for a project, improve your coding skills, turn to product / UX jobs or just learn new skills, go for it, it is one of the best investment I have done so far :)

What can you do in nine weeks? If you start a sport and take 9 intensive weeks of classes you'll barely be a beginner, if you take up a hobby (i.e. woodcarving) in 9 weeks you can do simple stuff. 9 weeks ago I was a finance graduate with no will to go and search a job in finance, with tons of ideas and no know-how on how to make them a reality. 

If you're thinking of joining the Le Wagon family you might see some similarities in the identikit above, so here's how it works:
Let's not sugarcoat it, it's tough. There will be times where your brain simply won't cooperate (first few weeks in my case) but don't panic, it's normal, your brain is getting bombed with tons of new information. I was a student of Batch #93 London, and in the second week of boot camp I was attending the reboot classes (when you have some ideas of what you're doing but you're not entirely sure, they'll make you attend catch-up classes, best thing ever). The only coding experience I had before joining was copy-pasting command line commands from Google in a Linux vm just to have fun. So, in London, you'll find amazing people that are there to help you, any problem or thing that's not clear just file a ticket and remember everything will make sense once you start the Rails part of the program! At Le Wagon there is not the education system style where teachers are teachers and students are students, the people that are teaching you and helping you out on tickets are alumni of the course (so if they made it why shouldn't you?), every Friday evening you're out with your classmates and teachers drinking and partying.

A few tips: 
- Do the online prep work
- Really do the online prep work and don't google the answers for the codecademy tracks. 
- It's better to arrive at day 1 over-prepared than under
- Ask questions, don't worry your classmates are in the same boat as you
- Be curious, the people in front of you are an immense source of knowledge that will answer everything, and if they don't know the answer they'll sit down with you to help you figure it out.
- Enjoy it, you're about to embark on a 9 week long journey that will really change your life, even if you're attending the course and not planning a career shift you'll see things differently after the course. 
9 weeks ago I was a finance graduate with ideas, now Le Wagon gave me the tools to create what I want, I have a hell of an mvp and people would actually hire me!

After seven years working at Goldman Sachs in London and New York, I took a sabbatical. I was looking for something different while capitalising on my business experience. The appeal of the Tech start-up industry became strong to me and I was looking for the best way to transition into this exciting ecosystem. Rated the best coding school in Europe & the World, I decided to roll-up my sleeves and do Le Wagon’s bootcamp in Paris.

Le Wagon’s promise: take motivated people with no coding experience and get them to learn how to develop web apps in nine weeks! How? With an extremely well though-out program, a highly competent teaching team, a fantastic educational platform and access to an ever growing alumni and network of start-ups.

From back-end to front-end, you get up to speed smoothly thanks to the balance between classes and coding challenges. There’s true support from the pedagogic team and all the right tools to help you succeed. Plus, beyond pure coding skills, you get to learn how to design a product the start-up way, dev as a team as well as how to master the many services you need to use to launch an app.

After six weeks, that’s it: you are ready to develop an Airbnb copycat in five days, final step before the last two weeks dedicated to your personal project. Promise held!

Le Wagon’s bootcamp it’s also getting into a mindset. It's a culture of learning, creating and even thinking. And if it’s foremost about coding, it’s also about the people. Be it other students, with their broad range of experiences and profiles or the pedagogic and management team, it’s one of those places where you only meet top individuals. Doing Le Wagon you’ll get the coding skills, the mindset and the network.

And when it ends…It’s not over! Lifetime access to the platform, connections to the best startups through events or newsletters, and even the opportunity to continue your training by becoming a teacher’s assistant. If you’re hesitating, trust me you shouldn’t. Don’t wait any longer and just apply!

I was one of the student of batch #77 in Montreal (summer 2017) and my only regret about LeWagon is that I didn't apply earlier !!
I'm currently studying in Entrepreneurship and before even starting the program, I realized that I had one major issue that I tried to solve without success. I had loads of ideas, but I couldn't transform them into a product that I could test and promote because I was not able to code by myself. I tried different online classes, CodeCademy, Treehouse, Udemy to name a few. After a year or so, I realized that I was not progressing fast enough. It would take me years to be able to code MVPs. 
I looked online for different coding bootcamp. Le Wagon was the one offering not only a coding bootcamp but an access to a network of 1500+ alumni. Needless to say that being a part of that family is incredibly helpful in every aspect. The platform offers you access to a ton of content as well as design feedback, job opportunities, etc. Plus, every single question is answered in a matter of hours. It is by far the most disciplined community page I've seen. 
On top of that Le Wagon is not just another coding bootcamp, the learning process revolves around two main topics. Coding is the obvious one, but entrepreneurship is also a big part of is learned. It would be the best training for any aspiring entrepreneur who wants to know how to code and have a better understanding of the technical part of the projects. 
What an experience it was, while I'm finishing my entrepreneurship study, I am still impressed by what we learned in just 9 weeks. I can now work on ideas and products I wanted to code and have them finished before the end of the year. 
It was 100% worth it and you won't regret it, stop waiting and go for it!!

I discovered coding by chance during an internship a few years before Le Wagon in a startup, and developed a real interest in the digital world from this point. I joined Accenture Digital for a job after this internship in order to do consulting around digital. After 2 years of working on digital projects between clients and developers, I felt the need to grow my technical skills and thought a bootcamp of a few weeks would be perfect. I decided to join Le Wagon because it is the best bootcamp in France and, luckily, also one of the best in the world. Plus, I had collected nothing but very positive feedback about this training from my friends / network. 

I presented this project to Accenture as a sort of short MBA specialized in Digital, and they were thrilled with the idea.  These 9 weeks of intense coding were probably some of the most enriching weeks of my life. The quality of the teachers, the real learning challenge set by the day to day pace, the new connections with really cool and interesting people, the Yoga classes... I truly recommend this bootcamp.   I am now back within Accenture and am in charge of implenting chatbots at my client's, managing a team of developers. I think I can say this bootcamp enabled me to build an interesting profile, both business and technical.   Thanks again to Le Wagon.   Stop thinking and just apply !

With a business background, I classically started as a business developer in tech companies in France and Singapore but was facing a lack of legitimacy saying things I was not clearly understanding to clients. Having heard good things about le wagon from friends that did it, I decided to apply and be part of the 1st batch in Rio de Janeiro. The beginning was really tough for me, as I had absolutely no coding basis, but the program is organized in a way that you cannot resign and work in pairs helps a lot. In the last 10 days of the program, my mates and I built maisumapedida.com an F&B delivery solution for stadiums in Brazil and without Le Wagon, this would certainly never have happened. When they say "Change your life: learn to code" it has been true for me, I wish you the same :) 

London batch #93, 2017

I am a linguist at heart, and got interested in coding languages when I started University. Then, I was studying to become a teacher of French abroad and only followed some courses online for CSS and HTML, which was both exciting and slightly frustrating because I didn't really know how to deploy a website.

When I decided to go for a more challenging career, a friend and Le Wagon alumni recommended Le Wagon's 9 weeks bootcamp to me, which he said was one of the best choices he had made in his life. He could not have been more right !  

9 weeks might be fast-paced, and every week started by struggling with all the new knowledge, but it always ended with a big, fat feeling of satisfaction. Le Wagon's dedicated team of teachers and almunis here to guide you helped digesting all the different languages and tools we learnt, and they made it a fun adventure in probably the best community I'll ever be part of !

I could not believe our huge progress at the Demo Day in Google Campus, when my team presented our phone-first web app and coded in Ruby on Rails. I fell in love with front-end, the magic of SASS and eager to jump on the React train. I cannot wait to create many more cool UIs !

Now it is my turn to recommend Le Wagon's incredible experience. If you're curious about coding, or you'd like to bring your product to life, join with no hesitation ! Le Wagon's definitely one of the best choices I've made, and coding truly is addicting.

I have a background in agriculture, graduated as an Agronomist in 2014, and I’ve always been  interested in technology and most of my work is related to it. But I felt that there was a big gap in my knowledge since I could not develop my ideas and even though I was studying programming in my spare time, I was not evolving in a good pace. So I decided to search for courses in technology here in Brazil to kickstart my career and suddenly there was a dilemma: I could either do a master’s degree that would last at least 1 and half-year or I could do some doubtful quality technical courses. Then one day my mother showed me an article about Le Wagon, I did some research about it and boom! It sounded perfect for me!
So I started Rio de Janeiro batch in July 2017 and learnt more programming skills in 9 weeks that I could even imagine! Don’t understand me wrong, Le Wagon is hard. It’s demanding. It’s full time and you actually spend more than 8 hours a day working on it. But somehow they make it learning hard concepts fun. It is fun to code! Sometimes you feel frustrated but when you manage to finish an exercise by yourself you feel amazingly smart. And the teachers are there to help you, they can feel your frustration and they help you on the right dose, just leading the way and telling what mistakes you should avoid.
From a pedagogical side, the course was perfect for me. The teachers were cool, the course was challenging, the exercises were hard and the students were into it. It is amazing how many nice people they managed to get in the same group, and people from all around the world with different backgrounds. And in the last few days, we had this enterprise vibe, everybody was on their groups working hard to build complex projects in a short time. In these last two weeks I could learn things that as a solo student would not be possible, working on teams, managing people, dealing with hard issues and actually building something with technology from scratch.
It was a deep, intense, hard but fun experience. I could attend great talks, and awesome social events. I am grateful to have learned so much in a short time, to meet interesting people and be part of a network of entrepreneurs, startups and people who want to make a difference. Le Wagon community is beautiful, we are part of a big international network of coders and if someone asks me if it was worth it the answer is, DEFINITELY!

 

Luiz Gustavo Zincone Neiva, Rio de Janeiro Batch #84

After years of playing around on CodeCademy I decided I wanted to up my game. I wanted to be able to turn my ideas into reality, and I felt that not knowing code was a barrier to my creativity. But at the same time I didn’t have the time, resources, or willingness to go and do a 4 year computer science degree. All I wanted to be able to do is launch a web-app. If that was ever successful I would hire people much better than me to do the rest of the coding. But at least I would be able to get something off the ground.

I had come across a coding bootcamp online a few years ago, so I started googling. If you have ever googled coding bootcamps you will know that there’s loads out there. If you haven’t googled it then trust me, there’s loads out there.

But for me there were 2 common problems:

1) A lot of bootcamps are focused on their graduates getting jobs as developers. Trouble is, I didn’t and don’t want to work as a developer. I wanted my money to go towards learning how to code, not making my tech CV look good, going to job fairs, and meeting with potential employers.

2) Pretty much all bootcamps, even the better rated ones (on Quora, SwitchUp, etc), had some pretty bad reviews. Even if they were rare, they were sometimes so bad that it turned me off them.

Then I found Le Wagon. Its main selling points to me where that they immediately overcame the issues above. They focus on you being able to launch an MVP by the end of the bootcamp, and they had only amazing reviews.

I think a big part of the story is expectation management, before the course as well as after. Web development is an incredibly complex and large field, and you can’t learn everything in two months (not even in 4 years). You are not going to be the best programmer in the world after the bootcamp. But you will be able to code and launch your own web apps. And even more importantly, you will be equipped with all the tools and concepts you need to continue learning on your own at a significantly faster pace than before. Now that I’ve done the bootcamp I’m actually considering applying for some developer roles and I feel very prepared to do so.

So first of all I am now a massive believer in bootcamps. I think they are the way forward and I got a lot more practical value from a two-month bootcamp than from a three-year university degree. But mostly I am a massive advocate of Le Wagon specifically. When I first read all the reviews online I could hardly believe that anything, not just bootcamps, could exclusively have such positive reviews. But now I can see why. The curriculum is thorough yet concise, the staff and teachers are awesome and dedicated, and the community is full of great people. Its not a cheap 2 months - no bootcamp is - but the people here care. They are not here to take your money and spit you back out with minimal coding skills or to get you any job so they can boost their own meaningless metrics. If you’re considering a bootcamp, do it. And do it with Le Wagon.