Le Wagon

It took me about 8 months before I finally joined Le Wagon Singapore.
It began on early September of 2020 when I heard about the bootcamp in Singapore from a friend. She had told me that her friend had took the course at a subsidised rate and found a job in a tech company.
For her to even mention it to me was because I told her I enjoyed the beginner python course in university. We used python with National Language Tool Kit (aka NLTK) for basic language analysis of politicians’ speech among other stuff we did.
After contacting Dirk Schuler, the founder for the Singapore and Bali branch of the bootcamp and doing a very short interview about my goals, I was sent information on the part time course and was tasked to do Codecademy course on Ruby. I had to report to them the time it took for me to complete the whole free course, and it had to be below 15 hours. It took me 6 hours in total, and I was almost proud of myself for that. Of course, it was not done in a single sitting.

After reporting to them about my result, they said I was okay to enroll and sent me a link to their pre-bootcamp courses which was expected to take 50–60 hours.

I completed it over the course of a few months and my part-time class was meant to start in January. But when the date approached, I realised I might not have enough brain power to learn coding while finishing my last semester in university with my graduation thesis being just halfway done. I told them I wanted to postpone my class to a full-time one around June, when I would have graduated from school.

Lo and behold, the COVID situation in Singapore wasn’t doing so well (not that it is now either) when June was nearing, and Dirk and Liana from Le Wagon contacted all of us to let us know that they wished to postpone classes till August.

Internally, I was relieved about it, as this meant I had more time to earn some pocket money with my part-time job while also delaying the responsibilities of an adult (since once I finish the bootcamp, it’ll be time for a job hunt). I needed the extra money to survive the few more months of joblessness I expected to have after bootcamp, and to be able to afford eating out everyday in the CBD area where Le Wagon classes would be held.
When August came, I said goodbye to my brainless days of part-time, and prepared myself for what’s to come. I was very excited and nervous.

The bootcamp
The first day of the bootcamp.

We were sat in pairs due to the COVID measures at that time. We were asked to introduce ourselves to our table buddies, and then took turns introducing them to the whole class.

It was exciting that my classmates came from all walks of life and it was amazing how we were all brought together to study the same thing — web development, and will be part of one another’s lives for the next 9 weeks.
Some things about the classes we were told:
1. We will be doing pair programming throughout most of the course
2. Lectures start at 9am and last for 1.5 hours or more
3. After lectures, we will work on the daily challenges
4. We raise tickets instead of our hands when we are stuck or have any questions (can be irrelevant to the challenges)

For the first day, we only learnt the basics of git and set up our computers for the upcoming lessons

But because most of us had already set it up in the weekends, class ended earlier for the first day.

We learnt real pair-programming on the third lesson

You can know more about pair-programming from this YouTube link, the same one they showed us in class.Before we knew it, we have completed all lessons on Ruby
And it was time for frontend languages. Cue HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This was the return of my headaches. I used to have headaches in the first few lessons on Ruby and always went home feeling grumpy, but it had subsided after I got used to the language. Who knew something like HTML and CSS, which most of us when we were young had seen before when the blogging era was on fire, would bring me such terror!

I had so much trouble getting my website to look the way I wanted. When JavaScript was introduced, I was happy again. It felt familiar and brought none of the headaches HTML and CSS had.
Hmm, frontend isn’t so bad with JavaScript! I thought.

It was only after a few days when HTML and CSS clicked and I feared them less. The headaches had lessen too. As long as the website is static.

Then, came Rails 6 Magic, magic, magic. So many magical things that are going on behind the scenes when we use Rails!

Before we were taught Rails, we had two big challenges (one per day, and those two days were known as Le Wagon’s most challenging days. coughs) revolving around MVC — Model, View, Controller (can read more about them here) so we did most of the routing from scratch.

When we saw what Rails could do, we teared up (figuratively).

JavaScript! AJAX! And teams!Once we learnt how to fit the frontend and backend and Rails together, it was time for our first mini project. We were taught additional stuff such as AJAX on that week. Pair programming also stopped and we worked in teams.

Oh yeah, about the teams.

A few days before the first project began, we had Pitch Night*.* A total of 7 or so of us pitched our ideas for final project and we even had a guest who came to observe as well. At the end of the day, we voted for the idea that we want to work on most, and the system made by Le Wagon sorted us accordingly. This was the team we would work with until the end of the course.

For our first project, we chose to clone Grab FoodThe README isn’t updated as of the time I am writing this, but here’s the link to the GitHub page. Hopefully, it’s updated by the time you clicked it.

We were supposed to have 5 days to complete the project, but due to a holiday taking up a day off our normal schedule, we started the project on a Tuesday and had until the next Monday to complete and present it.

To be honest, the extra weekend helped a lot as we were able to work on a few more fixes and features.

Also, my Acer laptop with Linux Mint running on it died on the very first day of the project!! I spent my first day pair-programming with my teammates. As I am writing this, 3 weeks since the incident, Acer has not gotten back to me on the status of my laptop. I have even called them last week to ask about it. Update: they contacted me for an exorbitant repair fee of S$781.10 which I immediately declined.
I bought the M1 MacBook Air three days after the incident and was glad I did. It was my first experience using macOS and it felt like a productivity machine!

Monday came, we presented, and we got to sleep well until…

The start of the Final ProjectOn Tuesday, we started from scratch again to build a usable website.

You can read more on the project here.

To sum it up, our leader who proposed the idea for the project had this one big pain: his friends weren’t initiative enough to suggest a place to dine in together whenever they wanted to meet up. Everyone usually left a few requests like their budget or time available before the chat went silent.

This pain was apparently very common amongst us classmates, so enough people voted to work on a solution together to form a team.

All in all, we had 9 days or so to work on this, and our presentation on Saturday marked the end of the bootcamp. 🥲
We also received our graduation certificate on the presentation day!
You can watch the whole presentation here.

Last but not least: Week 10 — Career week
As part of my school fees were covered by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)’s TIPP which stands for Tech Immersion and Placement Programme, I had to attend the Career Week programme prepared by Le Wagon Singapore.
The format of the class is the same as the bootcamp lessons in that it began with a lecture and we were given free time to tackle the tasks for the day, but it was online instead and guest speakers from the tech industry would join in and share with us what to expect in our future career.

The things covered throughout this special week were:

• How to write good cover letters
• Resume writing and review by guest speakers such as Nodeflair
• Q&A about the industry with the guest speakers
• A better understanding of which career and learning path we can choose, such as Frontend, Backend, Fullstack development, Product Manager, Engineer Solutions, and many others
• How and where to look for jobs and tackle interviews

We were also given a Calendly link that we can use to contact Miguel (Le Wagon Singapore’s General Manager, who was also an amazing teacher throughout the bootcamp) for anything we needed help with. I’ve personally used it twice and was glad I could still talk with him even though I’ve already graduated and they seem so busy with the new batch.

Because the alumni are all in the Slack channel that Le Wagon has, Miguel was able to refer to me people who are in the relevant industries that I showed interest in!
Also, thanks to one job posting that Miguel had shared to us, I actually landed a job in a month after graduating from Le Wagon Singapore. I’m extremely thankful for that.


Now that we’ve reached the end…

What I have learnt aside from the programming languages throughout my time my time at Le Wagon Singapore

• Learning a new framework gets easier over time
• SCRUM is very useful for keeping everyone occupied for the day
• Trello and similar services can really make projects go smoothly
• Checking your peers’ code is very important
• Never push broken code into master!!!
• Try to load your peers’ project onto your machine and play around with the app in case there’s stuff not visible from just looking at the code
• Never keep quiet when you are stuck at something, as this affects everyone’s productivity when they have to clean up your mess later and when problems snowball
• Never be afraid of trying to work on unfamiliar features as the takeaway will be greater!
• Be willing to throw code away if there are better ways to write it
• Variable naming is very important
• Leave comments when needed to make the code more readable, your future self or teammate will thank you for it

And probably many others that I can’t think of right now.
This 9 weeks at Le Wagon was a fun and enjoyable one, and I felt silly for being so anxious before it began. I also got to know more people and grew my network, so I want to share my gratitude by writing this post. I hope this can push someone to also take a step toward learning something new, be it at a coding bootcamp or in other hobbies, and meeting new people!
Thank you for reading so far.

Stay safe!

If you are looking for a bootcamp that offers a comprehensive curriculum, a great learning environment and incredible post-bootcamp career support then Le Wagon is for you!
I joined Le Wagon in July 2021 as I was looking to transition from my career in production engineering to a data based role in the tech industry. Le Wagon's Data Science course exceeded my expectations in three key areas:
1. Content- The syllabus at Le Wagon is quite comprehensive for a 9 week course. They started us off with some python, SQL and mathematic fundamentals, before moving on to more complex machine learning and deep learning concepts. At the end of the course, we applied everything we learnt in a group based project. The group project was definitely challenging, but it was so rewarding to be able to come from basically zero programming knowledge to being able to build and actual web app that utilised machine learning and data engineering. 
2. Excellent Teachers- The teaching staff at Le Wagon were top notch. They knew the content and could answer any difficult questions. They were also very patient, and were able to explain all the concepts clearly, taking time to make sure all students understood the material well before moving on.   They were also very encouraging and supporting, and their support cannot be understated. The material is quite difficult and challenging at certain points- but the teachers were very good in encouraging us to push through and helped us at any point when we felt stuck. I went to Top 8 University in Australia, and I can honestly say that the teaching staff at Le Wagon were better than any Lecturer that I had at Uni. 
3. Career support- No bootcamp can honestly 100% guarantee employment after completing the course,  but Le Wagon definitely did their best to help me find a job as soon as possible! After the bootcamp, we spent an entire week where dedicated staff helped us spruce up our LinkedIn profiles, resumes, cover letters and GitHub. This was definitely effective, as I was able to secure full time employment as a Data and Analytics consultant for a Big 4 company only 4 WEEKS after I completed the course. I could not have imagined a better outcome!

Former PhD in cryptography, I came to Le Wagon bootcamp to seek new opportunities in the field of data sciences, and I was not disappointed. As a computer science nerd the first two weeks were very pleasant, building the technical fondations and good practices, but it’s when we were introduced machine learning and deep learning concepts I realised I wanted to work in the data sciences. The bootcamp now completed I spend some time focusing on side projects while coming back in the topics introduced in the bootcamp in depth. I am currently a Teacher Assistant at the same Le Wagon bootcamp and will start my job search soon.

When I started my career in a startup my interest in tech increased and so I first specialized in technical SEO and data analytics, later I had my first points of contact with HTML & CSS. In my current job I interact a lot with developers in individual projects. Their work and collaboration as a team fascinated me. I wanted to understand the technical issues better and to participate in finding solutions and the further development. The part-time course of Le Wagon made it possible to combine my job and the bootcamp and get to know a full product flow from design to production. The 24-weeks were tough, intense and totally worth it. The teachers always took time to find solutions together or show alternatives from the first to the last day. My at the beginning sometimes thought “What am I doing?!” was replaced by a loud and proud “YAY!” ;-)  After graduation, I  continue working with my final project group “Meet The Yogis” as a post-bootcamp team to further deepen the skills I have learned in order to be able to work as a web developer in the future. 

Before joining the Bootcamp I was working in growth for various startups ranging from sports to fintech, while following a data driven approach there was still a lot of spreadsheets. I decided to join the Bootcamp in order to break the limitations of sheets, to become more independent in doing my own database queries and to communicate better with the data-team. What I really enjoyed during this super challenging rollercoaster ride through the world of data science was the peer to peer learning and well structured content of the lectures. Also always having a TA, who could provide a different point of view, really helped to get through some challenging moments.

 I'm a person with a programming background before joining Le Wagon, but I would say I still learned so much during the Bootcamp.

You do not necessarily need to have any programming knowledge beforehand, because they will provide you resources to prepare yourself before the course start.

At the start, they will teach you all the basic and fundamental knowledge of programming, starting from just what's the variable. Every day, they will gradually teach you more advanced stuff, more languages, more libraries/frameworks, and also provide you assignments or challenges that you can apply your new skills to solidify your knowledge. But still, you've to expect to learn really hard to be able to understand everything. It might not as easy as I make it sound, but it's totally worth it.

They're not just teaching you how to program, they also teach you how to work as a programmer such as how to use Product design, Terminal command, Git repositories, Project management tools, how to work as a team, and the best practice for each scenario.

Besides all of that, the teachers and staff are also really great. They're always there to give you advice, such as how to deal with programming problems, how to create a final Bootcamp project that will make you stand out, how to create a resume to make it easier to get a job, including giving you advice on how to make your online resumes like your portfolio website and LinkedIn.
 
The Alumni network is also really great, they provide you a connection with the other programmer in your area, they also occasionally have events that the alumni talk about their careers or experiences, which is nice to attend.
Last but not least, they also provide you with an internal learning resource that you can learn by yourself to expand your knowledge.

If you're not sure about the course, they also host a free programming course for beginners once every couple of months. Do not hesitate to give it a try.

I found a job 2 weeks after I graduated.