Le Wagon

Before starting Le Wagon, I was working as a Senior Consultant for a consulting firm specialized in tech. I was contributing to many projects. Mainly UX/UI, CRM and Marketing projects. But I wasn't fully satisfied because I wanted to learn precisely how things work. For example in design, you can be a good designer who knows how to use design tools (such as Sketch and Figma). But to become a great designer, you need some serious coding skills. It's really important to be able to differentiate what can be done, how long it will take, what are your constraints due to the tech stack, and so on. So I came to Le Wagon in order to develop that kind of skills and work on interesting projects.

I was really (and positively) surprised when I arrived, because above everything else, Le Wagon is a strong community of like-minded people. During the bootcamp, you meet a lot of interesting people who have various backgrounds, and different ways of thinking. This is extremely valuable because you will always work at some point with someone who found the solution to an exercise, but in a complete different way than yours. And this is where it gets really interesting if you are curious, because you will start to study different way of approaching the same problem. And then you will probably come up with several solutions, while being able to assess the pros and cons for each solutions.

This is just a small example of why Le Wagon is unique. Teachers are fascinating, very accessible, nice and competent. The staff is very active, and helpful when you need them. Like I said, this a community that lives with strong values, and also digitally with a myriad of Slack channels where alumnis continuously share helpful information, job posts, resources, tips...

Frankly, before starting Le Wagon I had fear that I wouldn't find what I was expecting with a bootcamp. But as soon as I started, I felt great and always pushed to learn more. And this was before the life-changing experience of the final projects where you work as a team. This is probably the best moments at Le Wagon, when you realize that, YES YOU CAN DO IT! You can design and develop great websites. And you are not alone to do it!

I found exactly what I expected, because Le Wagon gave me the opportunity to improve my coding skills, and now I feel much more confident as a Product Designer as I ever was before, because I have a better understanding of the articulation between design and code. I am able to design and develop my own UI components, and think more broadly about the UX, and how everything will work from a back-end standpoint. So yeah... Le Wagon is great, and if you are a curious and motivated person, I think you should definitely do it!

Who’s going in London for an APM (Associate Product Manager) program? I am!! Am I excited? Yes! Is it thanks to Le Wagon? Definitely!

I taught myself a bit about Product Management in my previous job as a project manager, discovered I loved it and wanted to dive deeper in this career. On job offers, I found out most companies were looking for technical skills and I had a business background. I found trainings, conferences, books, but I wanted expert ‘official’ knowledge that would be recognized as valuable by recruiters. I thought about keeping learning all on my own, but it takes a long time to look online for the best resources and practicing and learning after work on the evening and weekends is not so easy.

Le Wagon is a coding school that provides a solid framework on how tech products are developed: you learn how to code, how developers work (methods, mindset), you learn about user stories, user flows, product design sprint, design tools, UX… Lots of skills that can clearly give you bonus points when applying. Teachers are experts in their field and there is a real culture of excellency: students are very motivated and aim for the best, you work A LOT and you have a lifetime access to online resources that are very very very well-made. I loved that during these 9 weeks (and still after!), everyone was focused on gaining the most out of Le Wagon experience.

About Le Wagon community: it is clearly one of this training’s biggest asset. People are kind, helpful and always happy to share. I found a job thanks to a Le Wagon alumni through our internal Slack just a few weeks after having finished the bootcamp. I’m gonna be a Product Manager on a SaaS and guess what? They used to only hire engineers. But now I do have some technical skills, so I had my chance as well :)

I have always wanted to learn code because i thought that Coding was becoming really important for young people who want to become entrepreneur. I decided to sacrifice my summer and immerse myself in the world of code.

Guess what? It was not a sacrifice at all! I discovered that I love coding.

Le Wagon has been by far the most intensive and efficient training I ever followed.

The methodology, the staff and people were amazing!

After 9 weeks at Le Wagon, I was able to make a web app by myself and had enough confidence to keep on learning.

For several years, I worked as a digital manager in the art market field. At that time, I knew some HTML and CSS but I was a bit frustrated not knowing more. A few months ago, I decided to learn coding at Le Wagon to gain knowledge about it and be able to develop complex websites. Best decision I made ! It was an amazing experience ! These 9 weeks at Le Wagon were very interesting and intense. I learned to make websites from scratch: back-end, frond-end, database architectures...and I also met lot of great people.   You learn a lot in a short-time, guided by the great staff, always there to help and advise you. You never feel lost ! And the alumni network is very wide, supportive and active all around the world.   I recommend this bootcamp 100% for any person who want to learn coding and boost its career, whether you want to become a developer, a product manager or launch your own project afterwards !

I am a Product Specialist in a big ad tech company, but my background is in business. Taking Le Wagon bootcamp was the best decision I took in 2019, and probably one of the best decisions I took for my career in a while. Let me tell you why.
My role is to help customers make the best of our advertising solutions. Sometimes it can involve some technical discussions with developers, data scientists or even internally with product managers. Before attending the bootcamp, I was feeling limited in the kind of support I could provide to my clients, or in the type of conversations I could lead.
On a more personal level, I was feeling that my learning curve was slowing down. Working in sales, I was also under the impression that I was not necessarily in the right organisation for the type of skills or personality I have; and that it would be harder for me to  stand out and thrive.
Now, taking the bootcamp did not magically solve all these issues. Some are  longer-term questions I need to tackle. But first, I definitely feel savvier at my job. With this new expertise, I can take on more technical projects and look for opportunities to collaborate with tech  teams to extend the scope of my current role.  But the best effect of the training was a bit more subtle yet more dramatic. Taking this step back and proving myself I could learn new skills  made me gain an incredible amount of self-confidence.
Let me just conclude by talking shortly of the program itself. I loved the fact that is was very practical. Little theory, many exercises in pairs with the help of super-friendly Teacher Assistants.
To sum-up, I can only recommend!

Deciding to attend Le Wagon is turning out to be one of the most pivotal moments of my life more and more by the day.  Before Le Wagon, I was on a path that I didn’t truly want to be on.  I always had creative ideas, but did not realize how important this would be with regards to my career choice.  I realized as I got older that I wanted to try and make a start-up, but it felt like it was too late for me as I had never studied computer science or written a line of code until fairly recently.  The problem was that I was playing it safe by having decided to go to medical school due to a fear of trying to do what I really wanted to do.  It was a very risky route to commit to, and the security of being a doctor sounded more appealing on paper, for a while at least.  I always would procrastinate and tell myself that I would really follow my passions later, endlessly pushing the entrepreneurial can down the road and while making excuses.  Going further into the medical school route, I began to feel a deep sense regret that I was not doing what I really wanted to do.  I worried that if I were to make it to my deathbed not having tried my true calling, I would regret it more than anything else that could possibly happen in my life.  To keep a very long story short, it was not working out, so I left medical school and eventually ended up at Le Wagon Bali. 

 

Beforehand, while I was determining which coding program to attend, I researched my options pretty heavily as picking the wrong program could build a broken foundation and set you on a terrible programming trajectory compared to picking the proper one.  Le Wagon appealed to me for several reasons above all of the others.   Compared to the closest equivalent American programs, it was much more affordable for a nearly identical curriculum.  Just as important though, it was the only course I found that maintained an entrepreneurially inspired, product-based framed approach in its curriculum.  With an end goal of wanting to build a startup above all else, this appealed to me above nearly all else.  These factors along with the unanimously amazing reviews, diverse classroom locations, and the seemingly awesome culture fostered by the program were why I decided to eventually apply and enroll.

 

Let’s be completely honest here, the program is incredibly intense.  It feels as though it moves at nearly light speed to the point where it feels like trying to drink all of the water coming from a fire hydrant.  I prepared myself for the program ahead of time far more than was recommended, and I still found myself struggling often.  There were days that by the time I would get home, I felt completely dejected and would have no confidence in my ability to even complete the program and learn what was required to make a start-up by myself.  I even doubted that the program was legit in its claims at times.  However, throughout the course, they always would tell us to trust them and their process, so my batch and I all did that to help cope with our suffering more effectively.  Keeping the end goal of the reason I left medical school and came to Le Wagon in mind, to make my own start-up ideas get brought to life rather than just dreaming about doing so for the rest of my life, and with the help of the amazing staff and classmates, I persevered until the end when I finally really understood the big picture.  During many parts of the program, it’s admittedly incredibly hard to see the forest amongst the trees.  We spend weeks learning concepts as they stand alone, but it doesn’t all come together in a big picture sort of way until the end when the Rails framework is introduced to us to bring everything that we learn together to create real life apps.  Everything taught to us during the class that is included in the curriculum is there to be taught to us for a reason.  The structure of the program is all very well thought out to teach us what we need to know in the most effective and practical manner.   

 

It’s important to note again that due to how intense and fast-paced the program is, much of the real learning is achieved during the final weeks of the program.  It’s much more effective to learn these concepts in a practical real-world way by bringing them to work together via developing an actual working product from scratch than it is to learn about them in a stand-alone manner.  They all interact together, which is what makes the product-based approach to Le Wagon so amazing.  Overall, I’m very happy that I decided to join Le Wagon.  The culture that Le Wagon has built is an amazing and inspiring one to be a part of through the suffering and long-days we experienced.  The teachers are really the best.  They are so patient, helpful, and kind.  Many have gone through Le Wagon at some point themselves, so they truly do understand what we are going through.  The resources provided to us as students and alumni are both life-saving and game-changing.  The learning never really ends when it comes to the software universe, and Le Wagon really does an amazing job at providing a solid foundation with which to build upon for the various futures that its alumni wish to create for themselves.  I’m working on bringing an MVP version of my own start-up to life right now as I write this, all thanks to Le Wagon.  I was never able to learn these ideas by myself when I tried to teach everything to myself alone, and I am eternally grateful that Le Wagon was able to help me learn how to do this all.  I feel that Rails is by far the best framework to learn in order to develop a way to bring your own start-up ideas to life quickly and effectively. Ruby is a very beginner friendly programming language to learn as well when starting off too.   I’m grateful that I had a chance to attend Le Wagon, and I would highly recommend it to everyone who is considering enrolling. 

I really enjoyed my 9 weeks at Le Wagon. I feel like I have learned a lot, I now understand much better the logic behind web development, plus I have been given all the tools and resources to be a working independent developer. There is a good vibe in the bootcamp and the teachers and TA are very competent. At the end of the course you also get tips on how to prepare for tech interviews and they organize workshop in which you can directly meet with hiring companies/startups and Job Agencies.
 

My name is António and I am a graphic designer. I have been designing websites with Wordpress for clients for a couple of years, but the challenges started getting bigger and bigger, so I decided to look for a serious program that gave could give me a starting point to learning how to code. I found Le Wagon through a friend that attended the bootcamp a couple of years ago and has been working as a developer since then. I knew from him that LeWagon had a great program, but to be honest, my expectations were not very high, since I have no background in programming languages, and also have been avoiding numbers all my life. I thought that in two months it would be hard form me to learn how to develop a full application using a combination of programming languages that I had just discovered existed.

The bootcamp at LeWagon really exceeded all my expectations. It was amazing to see so many people with such different backgrounds learning to really develop a project in such a small amount of time. The first day I thought our class was big and that it would be hard for the teachers and TA’s to help everyone, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Every time I was struggling to understand something, there was always someone there to guide me through the best way to deal with that problem. I was impressed to see that anyone that is willing to commit to the challenge can learn how to code in those nine weeks. The staff at Le Wagon Lisbon are amazing and they really make you feel at home. The overall vibe was amazing and every student from my batch was eager to learn and also eager to help one another when someone else was struggling with a problem.

Every day was a wonderful experience and on top we always had a cold beer to drink with classmates at the end of the day.

Aujourd'hui, les coding bootcamps se multiplient dans la France entière. Avant de faire Le Wagon, je m'étais bien renseigné sur la concurrence. En pleine réorientation professionnelle, j'avais besoin d'une formation présentielle car je manquais cruellement de motivation pour suivre une formation (dans un domaine où la rigueur et le sérieux sont essentiels) de chez moi. J'avais peur de retourner sur les bancs de l'école et retrouver cette ambiance où on nous fait apprendre des choses sans en comprendre la finalité. Au Wagon, j'ai été agréablement surpris par le contenu pédagogique de la formation tant il était excellent. Nous avons accès à vie à des cours (vidéos et écrits) et des exercices, le tout étant continuellement mis à jour. Cependant le contenu de la formation est très dense il est alors essentiel de travailler sérieusement et de faire preuve de persévérance. Finalement Le Wagon et son équipe pédagogique ont réussi à me transmettre leur envie et leur passion, et je continue à étudier de chez moi avec cette même passion et motivation, ce qui m'était avant impensable. De plus, je me considère aujourd'hui capable de mener un projet web de A à Z. Le Wagon est donc un véritable tremplin professionnel pour toute personne motivée et sérieuse. Cette formation est une expérience humainement et professionnellement très enrichissante que je referai sans hésiter et que je recommande les yeux fermés.

When I decided to join  Le Wagon, I didn’t know what to expect. The reviews I had seen were overwhelmingly positive but you never know what can happen. My goal was to learn how to code in order to be able to get a job and, of course, continue my learning journey after the bootcamp.

 

We had to do some prep work before the bootcamp  to help us get prepared. I had finished it in time, but I have to admit that I didn’t understand everything.

 

Before the first day, everyone ( teachers and students), met to grab some drinks and to get to know each other better. Everyone was friendly and interesting.

 

During the bootcamp, being obliged to code all day really propelled my skills into another realm, the stuff I didn’t understand while reading about it in the prep work I understood, sometimes on the spot, during the bootcamp by putting it into practice. That would be one of my main pieces of advice to anyone wanting to learn to code : get your hands dirty. Practice over theory. 

 

Now that the bootcamp is over, I am proud of what I have learned and can say that, for me, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. Of course I am still a junior developer at the beginning of my coding education but I now have the tools to keep learning on my own. And perhaps, even more importantly, I made great friends and connections at the bootcamp from all over the world. 

 

For the reader that is considering doing a bootcamp, make sure that your expectations are aligned with the program at the bootcamp, because the program is not made for everyone. But once you are sure that bootcamp is for you, I’m sure you will have a great time !