Le Wagon

After 8 years as a Marketing Manager, the desire of launching my own project was so big that I finally decided to leave my job to try it.
One of my most important wishes was to stop wasting my time in too many meetings, and to find meaning by concretely building something on my own.
Because my project is an app, I needed to learn a lot about code. I think I’ve always had a quite good culture about web, but as a marketer who used to work with agencies. Technically, I was a beginner who could not understand a word while looking at a code page! 
A friend of mine told me about Le Wagon, which seemed to be the right solution for me, and that’s the way I finally integrated the batch70 from April to June 2017.
With hindsight, this program was a useful transition between my old job and my new working life. First, it’s helpful and inspiring to meet people who have the same problematics. Then, I re-learned to stay focus on the same subject more than 10 minutes (with no phone calls or colleagues interruptions :)), and to use my brain in a faster way. It’s also motivating to see that I was able to understand programming languages basics in a few weeks! 
Moreover, the pedagogic concept runs well with me. The buddies system and the « try-to-find-yourself-before-asking-to-the-teacher » spirit showed us how to work as a developper, to be autonomous, but also to work as a team efficiently.
And now that I’m on my own, even if my batch is over, I can still access all the resources Le Wagon gave us, and exchange with all the alumni. That is really useful and I feel more than ever ready to work on my project!

Before Le Wagon Bootcamp, I used to have a good position in a multinational company. But for several reasons, I wanted a carreer change. One day, I watched a video on the internet about LeWagon Bootcamp. Since then, I am completely found of web developing, and I won’t stop. When I joined the bootcamp, I realized that Lewagon is more than a bootcamp, it is a real human adventure where we meet incredible people. Everybody is passionate and ambitious. The community of developers is growing every day! We share good practices, job offers, and so on. Today, I feel comfortable with launching my own project. In fact, I’ve learned the best practices to work on a tech product. That’s why I definitely recommend LeWagon!

I could definitely say that the LeWagon bootcamp was an extremely rewarding experience and also quite unique when talking about the teaching method (and platform) itself. By the end of 2016, I finished my professional journey at the Rio2016 Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, where I worked for the Supply Chain planning. So far, I had been in touch with an 'upper layer' of programming, mostly improving spreadsheets and making them more automatic. Given my interest about it, and realizing how programming could be useful in so many other fields and approaches, I decided to look for a way to deepen my programming knowledge. That was when I found out about LeWagon, from a friend's recommendation which assured me that after the 9 week bootcamp, I would be able to develop web applications by myself. Even a bit skeptical about it, I decided to join the next batch in São Paulo (batch #64). Now I can tell you for sure that my friend was not only right, but also conservative in his recommendation. The 9 week program is minimally designed to make anyone learn about the mindset and structures about the development of a web project. Even though it is focused on Ruby (and its lot of integration with a series of other tools), the course shows itself to be mainly concerned about teaching the students the best ways (yes, there is always more than one) of achieving the objectives, and not only the correct answers. The feeling of understanding this logic behind the codes gives you a great overview about how applications are done, don't matter the language, and the startup environment of the bootcamp makes sure that it never gets boring or over-demanding. Who could say that after 7 weeks of lessons I would be able to code from scratch , with 3 other colleagues of mine, a full web application for a recruitment marketplace (headhunters x companies) in only 2 weeks? Hardly myself. After all, the final project was the base of an actual operational app for an actual operational company. The knowledge obtained from the bootcamp is already coming handy and making me fit for a number of professional opportunities that I wouldn't even consider before. All that being said, it is clear that LeWagon exceeded any expectations that I had

As a marketing project manager at one of the leading classified ads company in France, I decided to go to Le Wagon bootcamp to be more operational, to have a transverse vision and to code the projects I specified. The training, very intense, highly rewarding both from a human and intellectual point of view give me the necessary set of skills to carry out all possible web projects imaginable. The pedagogy and the tools provided are of a very high quality, thanks to LeWagon, I code every day at work and I love it!
Last but not least, LeWagon community is very large and powerful, which allows us to have mutual support and to discover many opportunities.

I’m passionate about computers and tech in general, I’ve learned everything I know about it all on my own, I’ve learned a little bit of programming in school and a bit of HTML and CSS but never dove too much in it.

One day, someone told me about LeWagon Bordeaux, I was looking for a job at the time and I said to myself, “since I like programming, why not go head and take my chance in this world?”, since then, two months have passed and I found a true new passion by the name of “Web developing”, I truly love making web apps.

During batch#67 at LeWagon Bordeaux, I programmed an app called “Happynvestor”, an app which helps you find the perfect real estate to buy so you can make the best profit out of it, I programmed it in ten days with three of my fellow alumnis, this was a really intense and learnful, both humanly and technically.

This bootcamp was exactly what I needed to learn code properly and start my career as a freelancer, the amount of skills you learn in two months is insane but really awesome, this was, without a doubt, the best experience of my life and I’ll do it again and again.

So, if you are still in doubt, just stop, go for it, you won’t regret it.

I attended Le Wagon’s coding bootcamp in Bordeaux from April to June 2017, whose aim is to train students to become FullStack Developers in nine weeks. At first it sounded like a tough job regarding my weak programming skills at that time, but after doing some research and meeting former students during events such as Meetups, I decided to give it a try. Or another chance to be more accurate. As a matter of fact, I already had a small experience as a programmer as I had already developed a few websites 10 years earlier. However, a poor teaching methodology had led me to think that coding wasn’t for me and that maybe I was meant to do something completely different. Several years and several jobs later, here is an opportunity to start from scratch and to eventually get a decent level in programming. The least I can say is that Le Wagon’s course went far beyond my expectations and I am convinced that the initial challenge was taken up by every single student of the batch. No matter if you have already coded or not and no matter how fast you are to learn and acquire new knowledge, you will eventually get to it. And if you struggle, teacher assistants will make sure you catch up as quick as possible. As most of them are former alumnis of Le Wagon, they are in a good position to provide very specific support to students. It is amazing how many subjects you can go through in nine weeks: Ruby, HTML, CSS, JQuery, Ajax, MySQL... and of course Ruby on Rails where you combine everything you have learned so far. Anyway, if you feel like giving your career a new boost, you can find every information you need on https://www.lewagon.com. Feel free to take a look at the projects realized by the students during the last 10 days of the course. Along with 3 of my classmates, we managed to build from scratch a website aimed at bar tenants to help them looking for artists available in their city. Check it out: http://onmuze.com

Hery, Auto-entrepreneur, batch#67 alumni, Le Wagon Bordeaux.

My Le Wagon Bordeaux journey? Well, let's get it straight: it was totally mental but worthed the pain 10 times!

Perhaps other students came into it with some web developpement knowledges already acquired but I went into it like from scratch. I wouldn't say from absolute zero because I made the required prep work before the bootcamp but almost ; and let me tell you: this was the best professionnal jump I ever made in my life!

Let's be immediatly clear : the fullstack program is incredibly hard but amazing. Everything, every courses serve a progressing main purpose and the Staff is highly trained to help you reach it. So I promise you this : it will work at the end of the day! I truly realized that the only real issue that you will have to face is... yourself.

"Bootcamp" here makes a real sense but if you hold on, if you do your best to keep up, there will definitely be an old you and a complete new you ready and eager to dig deep & code all day, every single day. This program is all about learning how to learn code.  

I also finally understood why Ruby on Rails reveals itself to be the optimal choice for this 9 weeks program, especially for Entrepreneurship, As an entrepreneur who wanted to upgrade its set of technical skills, I can draw now by myself all the creative concepts I kept on my mind all this time. Because I had no idea of how to make them happen with no financial means to hire a developper. And now guess what? I have one : me! Not perfect, surely a junior one but definitely a web developper.

Today, I am able to build MVPs with Ruby on Rails and let my creativity go out with HTML/CSS/JS. I understand what makes a page landing good or great. I can see clearly architecture of new 2017 designs trends. How big websites like AirBnB are designed and thought. During the last 2 weeks, I even build an entire Treasure Hunt mobile app with 2 teamates with essentially Javascript ffs!  

This is something I'd never thought I could do few months earlier... And now, I am just driven by one and only thing at a professional perspective: dig and practise more and more with many small little projects.

If you have a creative mind that only lacks technical skills to make your ideas come alive, I recommend you to just jump on this unstoppable train : https://www.lewagon.com/

I've been part of Le Wagon Bordeaux (https://www.lewagon.com/fr/bordeaux)
batch#67, from April to June 2017.

Before I join Le Wagon, I had a little developper experience, but not for the
web : C#.NET essentially ;
As I wanted to reorient myself as a web developer, it appeared that Le Wagon's
bootcamp was the perfect deal for me : a short and intense fullstack course.

9 weeks later, I found much more that what I was searching for : not only a set
of strong skills for web development, but also a rich human experience with a
new community : Le Wagon's great staff members, and my bootcamp teammates.

Le Wagon's pedagogical format is great : learning a programming language is like
learning a foreign language, and the best is to get immersed in.

I think that every student, regardless of his or her starting level, has
experienced a very significant learning curve.

Sounds perfect ? Yeah : I also felt in love with Ruby :)

Thank you Le Wagon for this great programming and human experience.

I had been wanting to learn to code properly for a while before joining Le Wagon. But I did not know how to do that, exactly. I never had the discipline for long-term self-studies, and was definitely not interested in spending years getting another university degree. Then one day, I found out about coding bootcamps, and immediately fell in love with the concept. A few months of fully immersive learning was exactly what I wanted. After some research I finally decided to apply for Le Wagon in Amsterdam.

Before I left, I was not sure that doing a two-month course abroad would pay off. People in Stockholm generally don't seem to know what a coding bootcamp is, so I did not know what employers would say about it. So I had somewhat low expectations for my post-bootcamp life, but decided to take a leap of faith anyway.

Despite my skepticism, everything turned out really well. I had an amazing time in Amsterdam, the teachers at Le Wagon were great and the curriculum well-planned. And shortly after returning to Stockholm I got a job as a Ruby on Rails developer in a small consulting firm. Also, our final project got accepted to a 6-month startup acceleration program in the Netherlands, which is really cool.

All in all, I'm very happy with my choice to join Le Wagon. The program doesn't teach you everything there is to know about computer science and web development (nobody can do that in 9 weeks), but it puts you on the right track and opens a lot of doors. I would definitely recommend Le Wagon to anyone dreaming of making a career transition to web development.

I attended Le Wagon bootcamp in January/February 2017 in Paris. Before applying to attend the bootcamp, I read many reviews saying it was an amazing training and that it was a life-changing experience. I can confirm now, it was.

Before Le Wagon, I was an entrepreneur and was working for my own company. Well, the business didn’t work out and I had to think about what to do next (going back to my previous previous job as a Marketer was not an option). I was feeling like I was missing something not knowing how to code. Plus, I wanted to stay in the startup system and coding skills were highly valued skills. So, after many researches, it became clear that Le Wagon was what I was looking for. So, I joined the batch#48 in Paris. And I loved it.

Everything was very well organized. You can feel that they have been improving the bootcamp batch after batch and that now the formula is almost perfect. Not only the courses were very qualitative and the methodology efficient, but the people I met there were all fantastic. The teachers were passionate, the staff was available and the community management was awesome, the students were all interesting and smart people from different areas. I am so glad I was part of the adventure.

I found a job right after the bootcamp as a backend developer. Beginning was tough, but thanks to Le Wagon I was really well prepared for technical interviews and the job that came after. The bootcamp is short and intense, but the foundations are solid. I am now starting a new career I enjoy so much thanks to Le Wagon, and I can still hardly believe it just took me 9 weeks to get there.

TL:DR: Le Wagon was awesome.

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I’ve done lots of fun things with great people, and I’ve studied in a lot of places, but never have I experienced something that was such a great experience and taught me so much in such a short time.

My experience at Le Wagon, Batch #57 (Barcelona) was worth every penny, no question. I can’t imagine having a better learning environment with more supportive and knowledgeable staff and diverse and interesting classmates. We had people from all over—the US, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Ireland, and of course a few Spanish locals.

The Environment

Don’t get me wrong, most of the bootcamp was spent indoors, but what can I say? It’s hard not to love studying in a place like Barcelona. Being in such a beautiful setting really boosted my experience. I mean, I got to walk past La Sagrada Familia every day on my way to class. If you’re a Barcelona native you probably try to look the other way, but I think I hurt my neck looking up so many times.

The coworking space we were in was modern and well equipped. There were some minor issues with Wi-Fi on occasion, but I believe those have been fixed, and I think the batch is actually in the process of moving to a different space.

The Leadership

The leadership really made the experience. I can’t imagine having better instructors and TA’s than the ones we had in Batch #57. Our lead instructor was an incredibly humble and personable guy who carried us through each lesson with a sense of humor and an approach that was laid-back while taking his role quite seriously. Since he was the lead instructor, he gets his own sentence here, but I can say that the other instructors and the TAs were also very knowledgeable, encouraging and enjoyable to learn from. I’m still in touch with several of them!

As far as the technical expertise of the instructors, I never once doubted their qualification to be teaching us. They really seemed to know above and beyond the stuff they were teaching us, and had an immediate answer for almost every question that was thrown at them.

There was always the sense that the instructors wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page and that no one got left behind. For those who struggled, the leadership did a great job of giving them extra help while balancing their commitment to the rest of the class.

Everything was well-organized and there were never any logistical issues that I noticed. This is in contrast to some horror stories I’ve heard about certain bootcamps stateside. From the Driver, instructors and TAs there was no snark, there were no walls up, everyone was receptive and communicative, and took their position seriously.

To the guys doing hiring at Le Wagon: keep up that good work! You’ve impressed me.

The Outcome

I’d been teaching myself web development for a couple years prior to my attendance, but Le Wagon really enabled me to bring it all together and gain the confidence I needed to know that I was in this game for the long term.

During the 7th week, my small group was able to quickly bootstrap a robust Rails app with several pages and a fully functional UI and back end. And during the final two weeks, we put together a much more functional app that made the first one look like child’s play. Our final presentation was made a success thanks to the coaching and technical help from our Driver and couple of the TA’s who gave us feedback during our presentation rehearsal.

Upon returning to the US, I quickly found a part-time remote position working for a startup that’s basing their SAAS product on Rails and AngularJS, and am currently negotiating with several contacts at local companies for a full time position. As of writing this review, it’s been about 80 days since the program ended.

To add to that, I made some great friends and acquaintances during our extracurricular activities (hiking Montserrat, going out for drinks, getting daily lunches). My classmates were the type of people that like to get things done: intelligent, personable, mature. I truly enjoyed having the classmates I did.

Would I do It Again?

If they make a Le Wagon On Steroids for teaching another new technology? Absolutely.

Before Le Wagon I had just graduated with a double major in Psychology and Sociology and a minor in Health Promotion. I knew I wanted to be able to work anywhere for a good wage so I looked into other fields of study. After doing a lot of research, becoming a coder/software engineer seemed like the best option. I quickly contacted Le Wagon and they accepted me for batch 49-Lisbon. Just a month after graduating, I was in a room full of creative, like-minded, intelligent individuals 9-7 Monday-Friday for 9 weeks. Through the weeks we all became like a family and pushed through the hard times of the program together as a team. The coursework sometimes seemed impossible but as I pushed through, I looked back and thought, wow that was not that hard! I feel like Le Wagon taught me how to immerse myself into a new study and now it has been very easy to work and teach myself new programming languages as needed. Right now I am working with PHP, Ruby on Rails and for fun, teaching myself game development with C#.  I never thought I would be a programmer and now I am loving it! Thanks Le Wagon for helping set up that foundation towards growth and continuous learning of programming.