Le Wagon

My name is Matthieu, I’m 29 years old and I’ve recently completed the 9 week bootcamp at Le Wagon. The idea of following Le Wagon’s formation came to me after few years working in the law industry.

Amateur of computer science, I wanted to develop my programing skills but did not want to spend more time than needed. I wished to be able to start working in this field ASAP. Since a few years, many companies offert this kind of quick formation and it’s hard to know which one to pick. I asked around, to friends, in the headhunting industry for instance, and many of them talked to me about this bootcamp. Unfortunately, when I  applied, there were no place left, so I decided to follow another course until the next session. 3 month later, I finally enrolled at Le Wagon in Paris.

The fact that I had followed a previous formation in programing helped me for the first days. Mostly, it enabled me to realize the benefits such a bootcamp : qualified, available and caring teachers. As far as I know, the programming community is full of helpful people and for most of your interrogations, you can find answers online. But for a beginner, having someone near you, explaining why your code went wrong is the easiest way to learn quickly. Besides the schooling, Le Wagon organises many events, allowing students to meet inspiring people (alumni, freelancers, CTOs, CEOs…)  which is very helpful to build a network if you’re new to the tech industry. It helps you to decide which position you would like to hold after the bootcamp.

After 3 years in business development in startups, I was frustrated not to understand the code behind tech products so I did Le Wagon! It was a learning blast!  I constantly learned during 9 weeks and I really appreciated the mutual assistance from co-workers and alumni. I had the image of solo developers and was surprised by the team spirit. I also found it really playful to solve problems and had the opportunity to pitch my project about employee perks and to construct a MVP with a great team. It gave me wings so as to continue to develop our demo project called Luma and try to make it grow for bringing happiness to employees.

After 4 years in a fast-growing startup, I decided to leave the company few months ago as a Product Manager. I joined le Wagon because I experienced a lack of technical background within the product field & felt that it was option for me to do. Indeed, I learned a lot about computer programming and now I see beyond the mockuping and design tasks that are regular for PM’s. All the skills that I learned help me now to go deeper into my job and explore infinite options to create awesome products. I highly recommend le Wagon to every PM/PO willing to level-up.

After 3 years working in support functions for a Tech Startup, I was frustrated not having a better understanding of technical topics.
I decided to develop coding skills with Le Wagon to find a job as product owner after the bootcamp. But the quality of the program made it really fun to learn and now I have decided to go on and improve my skills to actually find a job as web developer.
Also gathering different kind of motivated people from diverse backgrounds to develop new expertise created a great atmosphere.
I didn’t expect Le Wagon to have such an impact on my professional objectives and I highly recommend it.

Before Le Wagon, I was Head of Operations in a start-up in the Foodtech industry. 

I wanted to add technical skills to my resume and I choose Le Wagon which seemed to me the best "product-oriented" coding bootcamp.

During 9 very intensive weeks I learned a lot, about RoR, HTML, CSS, JS etc.... but also about myself. I haven't been that challenged for years. I'm also glad I had the chance to meet all these people with very different backgrounds.

I'm still impressed by the strength of the student / alumni network. Following the bootcamp I had great job opportunities from Le Wagon's alumni / entrepreneurs.

I'm now about to start a new job as a Head of Product Mobile.

I’m a Greek-American living in Paris for the past 12 years and I love solar power, biking, and music… and now coding!   I’ve been working for the past six years as VP Marketing at DualSun, a French solar startup that developed an innovative solar panel.  As part of my job, I frequently work with developers to build our web presence and I decided to do Le Wagon to work more efficiently with the developers — to be able to challenge and validate their work which is really hard to do when you don’t have the technical experience. I also wanted to do Le Wagon for personal reasons -- to learn something new, to work my brain differently, and simply to go back to school! And so I did Le Wagon Paris batch #220 (Jan-Feb 2019) and I LOVED it.  It exceeded my expectations not only on a technical level, but on human and social levels as well. On a technical level, I now not only feel competent to challenge developers, I discovered I love coding and that there’s a lot of stuff (not everything) that I can do by myself! The program is really well-designed with a (superbly-coded!) online platform with lectures, videos, exercises, and more.  The teachers and the TAs are great and helpful and make learning such a pleasure.  And we had such a great time with the other students — every day, you work with a different “buddy” which is a great way to meet new people and discover new learning styles. Beyond the course, the staff at Le Wagon is amazing and organized many incredible side events - CEO talks, happy hours, coding competitions, and of course, the final Demo Day.  And the network and post-bootcamp support is incredible too!  I could go on and on…. What’s next?  I plan to go back to my job at DualSun with a more tech-focused role, and hopefully continue dev projects on the side, and who knows, maybe at some point, become a full-time developer. In short, Le Wagon is an incredible experience to learn how to code… and so much more! 

Soon to be graduated from a business school, I joined Le Wagon in January 2019. After a digital marketing master, that provided me academic knowledge, I felt like I needed some technical skills. Learning to code seemed to be the most relevant thing to do. I won’t tell you that I was passionate about coding before joining Le Wagon, I won’t tell you neither that I dreamed about becoming a developer since my first day at kindergarten. That is not who I was and besides this, this is not really the type of people Le Wagon is targeting. But I can tell you one thing: I wanted to learn something that will help me to stand out from the crowd of “business-students-willing-to-work-in-digital-marketing”. And thanks to Le Wagon, I have been served! Honestly, I can say that it was one of the most enlightening experience of my life. I learned so much. I learned about API, parsing, scraping, AJAX… Did I lose you? That’s ok, I can’t even realize that I am actually using these words, me, Jeanne, that used to be a French Literature student! And this is what I liked the most about Le Wagon: people coming from different backgrounds, but no one knew how to code. Working alongside curious people challenged me every day to do my best. Now, I can say I like to code, but what I like the most about coding is that it is a world of possibilities, and the knowledge never stops! It has truly changed my vision of the digital world and I feel ready now to join a tech start-up or a digital agency/consulting firm.

We all know that time flies, even more when you are having a good time. This defines exactly the bootcamp Le Wagon in Paris I just attended (batch #220). Before giving you more details on my awesome adventure at Le Wagon, let me tell you first how I came up with the decision to enroll in this bootcamp.

Initially graduated in Finance degree, I worked in an asset management company as an accountant for 6 (long) years. Classic, steady and comfy executive job you would guess. Bored of seeing the same figures and Excel spreadsheets over and over again, I seized the opportunity during my company restructuration to change path. I was kind of a nerd during my childhood and was always interested in the web and tech fields. Having heard good things about Le Wagon from some friends working in this environment, I decided to give a look and a try after reading useful reviews (I hope this one will help too!)

You could imagine that 9 weeks is too short for being a web developer … Indeed, this is brief but so efficient as those 9 weeks are perfectly optimized to learn! The courses are perfectly balanced between lectures in the morning and practical exercises for the rest of the day to assimilate on your own pace. You see and live every day differently as you learn to team up with people. The staff in Paris are warm and care about their students by paying attention to them until the end and after the bootcamp.

I was starting from scratch on web languages, and I learned so much during the 9 weeks that I am now more confident to pursue my career in the web industry. My adventure in Le Wagon brought me a convivial social network and good friends with whom you could tell lame nerd joke! Don’t be afraid of going to the yoga that the bootcamp offers, first it will relax you from your laptop (and take some ninja naps) and you will make your body and mind more flexible (I was as flexible as a tree before and I can easily touch my feet now!)

After Le Wagon, I plan to land a first job as a FullStack web dev job, and during the bootcamp, I had some friends that had ideas of project but didn’t know where to start the app, and I could tell them the feasibility with my Le Wagon experience. So, I have also several projects, including a bot that will automatize business flows and a personal finance planning analysis tool.

Thank you for reading me and hope you will enjoy Le Wagon if you decide to step in!

I got my Master II in Digital Business & e-Commerce in September 2018. I did a work/study training program in Saint-Gobain for the last 2 years, in the e-Commerce department.

Interviews after interviews, one thing kept coming back: I did not have enough tech abilities.

That’s why I decided to join Le Wagon in January 2019 in Paris.

At first, I thought that I would be overwhelmed by all the new things I was going to learn, but the program is extremely well studied, and everything then seems obvious.

9 weeks can seem short to learn to code an app from scratch, but you would be amazed how fast you’ll learn.

The atmosphere at Le Wagon is very family-like. Everyone is here to help each other, no one is better than anyone. We all share the same ambitions and the same will to learn something new. There are lots of different types of profiles, and that’s what amazing about it.

Le Wagon was kind of life changing experience for me. Now that I found what I really enjoy doing, I’m looking for a position as a Developer Web Junior, I decided to get away from the business side. I’m much happier in the tech environment.

I applied to the Wagon bootcamp to strengthen my technical skills. I began my career as a Consultant, then as a Marketing Project Manager in a pure player travel company. I liked the digital ecosystem very much. I could rapidly evolve as a Software Product Manager, which I enjoyed very much. However, this new job required to develop new skills, to be able to translate the Product vision into something that could be understood and used by the developers in my team. I felt uncomfortable, because I had a too approximative idea of how a website is built. Le Wagon gave me a solid technical basis that helps me everyday to understand precisely the technical implications of the features I imagine. Also, it gave me the keys to dig deeper into technical subjects that interest me. For instance, I was able to develop my first chatbot, and I recently began a training on data science!

At the time when I started Le Wagon bootcamp, I already had experience with IT. My initial plan was to enroll at the university, but 2-3 years of study were too long for me, and I realized that a 9-week bootcamp was the best choice.

Every day, coding was not difficult for me. In the same time, we had additional exercises for experienced programmers. The atmosphere was very good and the teachers really tried to help you. I made some very good connections with teachers and students. Also, we had every week offline meetups with interesting subjects.

As a result, I found my job at the end of the bootcamp.

Highly recommend.

I started my career in the shipping industry (oceangoing tankers) and got quite frustrated by its conservative working methods, especially the lack and quality of software I had to work with. Coming from a background of economics, I understood linear programming problems but had no knowledge about coding. After playing around with excel macros I learned that I enjoyed these kind of problems but did not know how I could get into coding as I hadn't studied computer science (and I certainly did not intend to spend years in school again). Also the false idea that you have to love math left me somewhat reluctant. I decided to take a break and travel for some time. 

Close to the end of my trip I ran into the concept of coding bootcamps. I don't remember what the lead was that made me look in this direction but as soon as it caught my attention I got very excited. I specifically liked LeWagon since they are hosting a program that is oriented towards building a product (I am entrepreneurial by nature so this suited my personal interest). Also they were priced most competitively. 

During the bootcamp I was amazed by the learning curve. I had zero knowledge of coding; I initially did not know what frontend or backend meant, what Github was or what happens with an http request. Actually, even html and css were new concepts to me. A new world opened up to me! During the bootcamp you have a morning lecture, followed by working on problems with a buddy (pair programming) in the end of the morning and afternoon to discuss the problems and live-coding at night. This mix of learn-by-watching, learn by doing and learning-by-teaching method is extremely effective.

Apart from the super fast learning that I enjoyed I became very excited about how there is no end to the innovation and creativity in tech. Halfway the bootcamp we got to pitch our own ideas in order to choose a final project. From my time in shipping, I had an idea to automate a complex process of contract assessment in order to determine what charterers have to pay shipowners for incurred delays in port. Three other students chose to join the project and we worked on it for the last two weeks of the bootcamp. Many times we thought we got in way over our heads but there was a lot of support from teachers to help us crawl through the challenges we faced. Eventually we got to present a well working and good-looking MVP at the grand finale: demo day. In those last weeks basically everything that we previously learned came together and fell into place perfectly. We did not only learn how to solve coding problems but also how to collaborate in teams and align the many different tasks that the project required. 

Since the bootcamp many new ideas came to mind. You start looking at problems in a different way and it so much easier to evaluate what the scope of a project is and whether it is worth to get started on it. And to get started has become very accessible now. 

I strongly feel that learning to code for my generation is equally important as being able to speak English. Even if you don't end up becoming a developer, knowing how the digital world fits together is essential. I have already recommended this bootcamp to many of my friends. In my opinion this is the most effective way to learn the essential range of concepts and skills in a very very short time.