Le Wagon

Before joining Batch 281 at Le Wagon Montreal I was working in B2B Marketing for IT. The job was ok but there was no room for growth in the company. I felt stuck and really wanted a change. But I also didn’t want to go back University for another 2-4 years. A 9-week bootcamp sounded perfect. So, I applied. Flash forward a few months to the first week of “camp” and right away I knew it was going to be worth it. Our daily schedule was honestly the best part. Class was only an hour and a half long, followed by a good 6 hours of practical exercises. Learning to code is hard and the only way to develop and get better is to practice as much as you can. Believe me, you practice at Le Wagon. By the end of the 9-week marathon I had built so many things it was amazing. From simple math programs, to a multi-page e-commerce site with full front and back end capabilities, it’s hard to think that it was only back at the beginning of July that I started all of this. Everything I’ve said so far alone would make doing the bootcamp worth it. But there is so much more to it. I met and made new friends, made fantastic network connections, attended my first hack-a-thon, and joined a network of amazing Alumni from around the world. I loved my time at Le Wagon Montreal and wouldn’t change the long hard hours and large team projects for the world.

my trip with the Paris wagon.
When I started thinking about participating in The Wagon, many people tried to discourage me by telling me that I can learn all these things online or that the market is already saturated with developers. Some thought I would find the coding boring, even though nothing could have been more boring than my old Job.
I was a physical trainer but I was bored.
I worked in France and England but I was bored.
Then I made the decision to make the car and applied.
What can I say except that it was exceptional.
I'm not disappointed that I did it and my only disappointment is that I didn't do it sooner.
Everything is magnificent from the premises to the people we meet, the evenings with the alumni.

The content of the courses is rich and well explained.
The teachers are patient and know how to get you back on track if you ever let go.
It's intense especially during the first 3 weeks but you have to hold on and not lose hope.
Things integrate into you without you noticing.
I didn't think I would be able to succeed in this adventure, the teachers supported me and motivated me until I unblocked and headed for success with the certificate.
every week you have an after work and different activities which makes you feel like you are part of a big family.
And indeed we are a big family with links all over the world.
If you hesitate any longer, you will miss out on an extraordinary adventure that can change the course of your life.

I had no technical background or experience at all when I decided to join Le Wagon, I have a degree in Literature/Philosophy and had spent 8 years in education recruitment - so quite different! I’d been contemplating making a career change for a while, and did a lot of research into different options before I landed on the idea of a bootcamp course. I applied to a few of the different bootcamps in London but was leaning towards Le Wagon for a number of reasons, two of them being how welcoming and friendly Alex was when I had my interview at their (really cool) London campus, and secdonly how active and connected their alumni network is. I wanted to be part of something that doesn’t suddenly end when you finish the course, but is about giving and receiving support for the long term. I was accepted onto the course that started in July 2019, and the course itself was a complete whirlwind of great fun with awesome people. The days were intense and I dreamt about code pretty much every night, but they have perfected the balance between hard work with social activities and really nice touches, like cake every time it’s someone’s birthday (which was a lot), yoga, pizza lunches and other social events to help everyone let off steam. The curriculum builds day by day in such a way that feels so natural - you don’t realise how much you’re learning until you’re suddenly building entire web apps! I absolutely recommend Le Wagon to anyone who wants to learn to code without hesitation.

Lawyer until June 2018, I did batch #250 at Le Wagon Paris between April and June 2019. Before Le Wagon, I created my training organization in October 2018. Since a very young age, I was interested in computers. Fascinated by coding, learn it was the next logical step.

Because of my schedule and after looking a few different schools, there was one in particular that caught my eye. It was Le Wagon ! Why ? They teach you « coding » in only 2 months, and they make it very easy for you to reach your goal right after (find a job, start your own business...).

I've never learn so much in a short period of time !

The most amazing thing that I truly value during my time at Le Wagon was meeting so many like-minded people. Not just meeting our teachers and cohort, learning in a co-working space got me a chance to meet different entrepreneurs, developers, designers... It helps me to stay motivated and inspired throughout my coding journey. The teachers and teaching assistants are always there to support you and you will be learning a lot really fast.

And you know what ? I’m now, in turn, a teaching assistant at Le Wagon Paris.

A big thank you to Le Wagon Paris and their staff for making this whole bootcamp a life changing experience.

If you are wondering whether you should do it or not. Just stop wondering and go for it, you will never regret it.

Having been into tech for some time, I joined Le Wagon in Bali between graduating from uni in London and starting my job in ecommerce at Amazon a few months later. My goal was to acquire the skills necessary to evolve within more technical roles within the tech industry or be able to put together a product quickly if I ever wanted to start a business.

Le Wagon promises to bring technical skills to creative people and delivers on that promise splendidly.

As you start the bootcamp having seen some of the products presented on demo day, you think ‘There’s no way I’ll be able to do something like this’ but as the weeks pass by your ability to build grows exponentially and everything starts coming together. LW provides all the skills you need to put together a well-functioning, well-designed app. I was lucky to be able to build my product idea in a team of 3 and the end result exceeded in every way the expectations that I had for an MVP.

First you learn about the inner workings of Ruby, Object Oriented Programming and the MVC pattern, that will let you build the back end of your project. You then learn the UI/UX side of things with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Finally you learn to make everything come together with a developing framework (Ruby on Rails) and get plenty of opportunities to practice by building two web apps.

About Bali:
I literally cannot think of a reason why someone would choose to do Le Wagon anywhere else than Bali. It will cost you less to fly in and out of you country and live in a villa near the beach and live comfortably than rent a room and live day-to-day in a big city.

I also cannot think of a better learning environment than Bali. Let me illustrate my point with a description of perfect day at LW Bali:

6:30am: Wake up and drive down to the beach on my scooter for a surf lesson
8am: Come back home, jump in the pool, shower and head to Le Wagon. The classroom is on the rooftop of a hotel with sea view. Get an omelette for ~£1 from the hotel’s kitchen, get ready for the day.
9am: Go over today’s new concepts in the  1h/1h30 lecture, settle with my buddy for the day on the bean bags on the terrace and start work on today’s exercises.
12:30am: Lunch break. Go with some classmates to one of Canggu’s restaurants (they’re all super close), eat a filling and healthy lunch for a fraction of what it would cost me in London. Head back to LW.
1:30pm: Solve more problems, they usually get more and more challenging as you get through them. Raise a few tickets if I get stuck on some exercises.
Around 5pm: Live code time, a teacher presents us with a problem that we have to solve in teams right there, and then we go through the solution all together.
6pm/6:30pm: Head to a bar/restaurant on the beach with some classmates, share a beer and a dinner, watch the sunset.
8:30pm: Go home and go over today’s flashcards to internalise today’s new concepts. Sleep early to feel energised for the next day!

All in all, the quality of living is so good that you can focus truly on getting as much as you can from the program. The vibe is relaxed enough that you don’t feel FOMO from working a lot but dynamic enough that there’s always somewhere exciting to go on the weekend.

About the people: The core team is amazing and makes sure that everything works out fine. When I had a last minute passport issue, they worked with me and found a last minute solution that solved the issue. They’re people you can talk to seriously if there’s an issue but that you can also have fun with on the weekend.

As for the students, the people that do LW in Bali are often ppl that travel to Bali specifically for the bootcamp. As such, the classroom becomes your main source of socialising and you develop a tight community feeling. There are more people that are professional and come here to transit to something new than say, college graduates. The Bali effect means that age barriers don’t really apply there, I was the youngest of the batch and never once felt that was an issue. Everyone comes with their own background and everyone leaves Bali with an international network just from that classroom.

Wrapping up:

I left LW feeling more empowered than after 3 years of university, and probably learned what would have taken me at least 2/3 years to learn by myself in my free time. Also taught me how to learn, after the bootcamp I was able to build my own personal project from scratch with only the help of Internet when I got stuck (and a few posts in LW’s Slack ‘Help’ channel :))

I know some other bootcamps are way more job oriented and will spend time on acing developer interviews, or will train you super hard in one language so that you can get a job as a developer in that specific field. If that’s your ambition, those bootcamps might be a good option for you. Who LW is for: the budding entrepreneur, the creative, the guy who wants to become a product manager. LW focuses on letting you build stuff.

It's been three months since I finished Le Wagon's Bootcamp and I'm pretty happy how things have gone so far.

Well, prior to Le Wagon, I had been working as Product Manager in Rio de Janeiro but I've never had the chance to really dive deep into technology, which has been my goal since I figured it out this was the market that I'd like to work on. As a PM, it is really important to evaluate the customers' needs, to know how to deal with the different stakeholders and, of course, understand what has to be done to solve the customers pains. However, in the startup environment, things happen really fast and your pace must be equivalent, in order to deliver value to the customers and its investors. Thus, I felt that I had a technology knowledge gap which was holding me down to take higher flights.

As soon as I felt that I needed to take this step deeper into technology, I found about Le Wagon and, since from reading its syllabus, I felt that it would be a great opportunity to learn and evolve as someone who wants with technology for life.

I took part of the #261 batch and it was a great opportunity to meet new people, exchange experiences and, of course, learn a lot of new things. The bootcamp is really hands on, with a lot of practical exercises and with a dynamic really similar to what is working as a developer in the real world. The student really needs to look for the answer, debug its code and learn from its mistakes. Also, what impressed me was the product driven mentality from it, which lacks in a lot of companies and is a huge differential among other developers.

After struggled a lot, I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. At the moment, I work at Stone Pagamentos, the most valuable payment company in Brazil, as a developer and I'm sure that the Le Wagon took a huge part on it.

Before Le Wagon, I had just finished a year long internship at a big corporate where I was tasked with a bunch of innovation projects involving technology. The biggest thing that stood out to me was the disconnect between the technical teams and what they referred to as “business”. This was by far and away the biggest challenge to building large scale, successful technical solutions at that company. 

So I thought I would do Le Wagon so in the future I am able to bridge that gap. I was hoping I’d do well to come out the other side able to hold a conversation with a developer. Little did I know that you really could become one in the space of 9 weeks. It is a truly effective programme that goes fast, but not unmanageably so. I really feel like we have covered the fundamentals quite extensively, which was a fear I had when considering this.

The greatest thing for me was the product focus of the programme. I am pretty sure that in no other setting could I get that level of digital product understanding because the reason for it wasn’t just the content, but all the people as well. You get a real entrepreneurial spirit at Le Wagon and it translates into how teachers help you, what you discuss in spare time, what you build for final projects etc. Final projects, the way Le Wagon sets them - with design, development, deployment and marketing all covered, is simply an awesome way to learn! In the end I am so happy with the decision to go and it has been life-changing, just as advertised. Before, I was an aspiring entrepreneur having to work for someone else because I couldn’t find a technical co-founder, now I am doing my university degree while building 2 startups from the comfort of my home.

I’ve always been a nerd but I’ve never had the patience to sit down and code, let alone where to start. I remember the first weeks of the course, having done the prep work I thought we would be eased into the world of coding with a few theory-based lessons. Instead, I found myself learning how to use the terminal on the first day, and I’m pretty sure my first line of code was written on the second. Thank code it was practical, I’m the type to switch off if I’m not engaged by what I am doing. Each week we would complete a set of challenges. Each week it would get more complex there would be moments where I was pulling my hair out, however, the teaching staff were always on hand to help breakdown the problem and help me reach that eureka moment. The part-time course was challenging and it’s not for the faint-hearted. You are about to embark on a journey of trials and tribulations for 6 months. But my, it is worth it in the end. I’m far more competent than I ever imagined. My reason for doing the course was, having some entrepreneurial spirit I’m always hatching an idea. Whereas in the past, I may have cobbled together a landing page, using some HTML template and a series of trials and errors. Now I’m capable of building a web application and this is what I plan to do with my newly found free time. Well, at least some of it. This course is for entrepreneurs and wannabe developers alike. I would also say anyone working in the tech sector would benefit from this course. I myself work for an app and this course has enabled me to understand conversations that in the past would have gone right over my head. Viva Le Wagon!

I dabbled in coding when I was in high school but never thought to pursue a career in it. I have a bachelor's degree in business economics and after spending over 4 years as an ophthalmic technician I decided I wanted to do something different. 

The Bootcamp was definitely a challenge for me, and I struggled initially in a good way. I think the structure of the Bootcamp and learning method worked for me. Short and intense lectures every morning and then the rest of the day to work on what we learned that morning. It's really an incredible learning curve and it was amazing to see how quickly i progressed. The resources that Le Wagon provides are outstanding. The learning platform we used, Kitt, is great because all the lesson material is in one place and we can always refer or check the lecture slides and knowledge base because we have lifetime access to it! 

I worked on Lavender, a platform for social investment as my final project. I especially enjoyed JavaScript - one of the many programming languages we learned in the Bootcamp. It makes dynamic websites and I was able to code the features in the final app we presented at the end of the Bootcamp. I enjoy every part of the development process but my favorite is working on the front end because of its creative potential, because I can see the results immediately. So I think for anyone interested in coding, I really recommend Le Wagon because you get to explore different languages and eventually you'll see what works for you and maybe you even discover what you want to do with these new skills. 

Doing the Bootcamp in Bali was a great decision. Le Wagon has locations all over the world but I felt that coming from Los Angeles, it would be a similar environment. The weather is great and I don't think there's any place I'd rather learn to code in. You have this great view from the classroom and it's all positive vibes. Spending 2 months in Bali really makes a huge difference.

Before I started the Bootcamp, the goal was to learn how to code and produce creative products and solve problems. I was able to accomplish all of that after 9 weeks, that's pretty crazy. I definitely had to work hard throughout the program but it was worth it. Le Wagon has helped me start the journey to pursue my interest in building scalable, innovative products that can make a positive difference in its users' lives.

Graduated from a business school, having worked in finance, marketing and business development in the Real Estate Industry and Banks, I was seeking to develop my entrepreneurship skills.

I always was excited intellectually about coding, starting like many financial persons on excel and going through VBA to automatize many processes of the working place I used to work into, improving the fluidity of the operational part, diminishing repetitive actions and minimizing human risks.

Deeping myself into the code, was for me a necessity, mainly because I always want to learn about everything, but moreover be able to understand, communicate and exchange in my future jobs (that will for sure be in the tech industry) with either technical or business persons.

What is the most surprising in this experience, is that you came to learn code, thinking that you will spend hours on your computer, and going back home exhausted. Well, most of the days you will...

But some other days, starting paying attention to your environment, you will meet incredible people, with outstanding background: from the person being a monk over the past 10 year looking to change his life for good, to the marketing / HR persons looking for to have shift in his career passing through the professional tennisman and brilliant entrepreneur passionate about investment.

Having such diversity is what makes this Bootcamp something bigger than just a learning experience. Maybe not everybody leaves from here, having new best friends, but for sure you are now a part of a new family. It's just up to you to dive yourself into it.

 

So, what I'm doing now ?

• Having a focus on the product I dedicate my recent days to work with my CTO in my start-up on the UX / UI (being more interested in the front aspect) conceiving and achieving our product.
• At the same time, I'm on my way to pass jobs interview to join two persons of my project team (grizbi) that has been hired in the same place, a consultancy firm dedicated on digital transformation integrating technical aspect in his reflexion and having a environment similar to the one that you can find in le Wagon.
• And finally but not the least, as I always wanted to involve myself in education, I had the opportunity to join Le Wagon's team as Teacher Assistant in order to help and follow the new student in their comprehension.

That's it for me, the rest you will have to discover it by yourself, but first come to the Demo Day to just have a hint of what can be a signifcant change in your life !

Good luck on your learning path !