Le Wagon

Before Le Wagon I was working as a Venture Capital Analyst and before that I was a Credit Analyst for Bpifrance in the innovation department. With my degree and working experience in engineering, the logical next step for me was to get technical skills to open up other doors. I tried to enrol for Le Wagon in Paris but it was full, so I decided London was close enough.

My experience at Le Wagon in London was amazing! The teachers and the students were all amazing people, everyone was working very hard but in a really nice atmosphere. Everyday after the morning lecture, you work with your designated buddy for the day on several exercises in order to perfectly understand the new topics. If you are stuck or have any question on an exercise, other students or teachers are always there to help you fix your problem. At the end the day you realize that you know way more than when you woke up; you have a live-code to practice your new skills  as a group and then it's beer time, you talk with everyone and make very good friends.

At the end of the 4th week, you can pitch a web app idea so other students can vote for it, and develop it with you as a 3 or 4 people team during the last two weeks. I personally pitched my own idea and it was selected. My project was about making an app that based on your tastes suggest you a recipe that you could cook and generate its shopping list. You can see the result here: www.hubert-cooks.com

As a conclusion I'll say that Le Wagon is a really important step in my life, I met new friends for life and finally found something that is really useful and really enjoyable to do: to code!

I love Le Wagon for so many reasons!

One being this thing they call ‘reboot’ – little “Are You Okay?” checkpoints integrated into the curriculum right at the beginning. You’ll live-code in a smaller group, tackle problems together and more importantly, work at a slower pace. This really helped me solidify certain concepts I was struggling to grasp and gave me the confidence I needed to progress.

Highlight numéro deux! Le Wagon’s teachers and teaching assistants are awesome – I mean, how else did I make it till the end!? All them know exactly what you’re going through – most of them did the bootcamp themselves! – so raise lots of tickets (Le Wagon speak for ‘putting your hand up’), get the help you need and don’t worry about asking silly questions.

And of course, I love the community! Learning alongside an altogether lovely group of people made those tough days so much better. When I started, I wanted the course to end ASAP. Fast forward a few weeks and I couldn’t imagine learning to code anywhere else. The Demo Day after-party is also a riot …I’ll leave it at that!

Thank you Le Wagon for helping me become a designer who codes! YAY!!!

I had just graduated from my business degree in December but I felt that what I learned was too generic, with so many people graduating in business I thought I wasn't offering anything different, so I thought a full-stack boot camp would be a good way to differentiate myself. I did wonder how there were so many reviews of 5 out of 5 stars on the internet. But after I started reading a few of those reviews I started to get more and more convinced. The application process was by far the smoothest and easiest I have experienced, including a quick online form and a telephone interview with Ed the manager of the London Bootcamp, one of the coolest guys I've met. The course was very intense, and in the first two weeks I felt like most of the concepts I was taught did not have time to sink in, but soon I realised that when you are fed so much information so fast, the brain needs more time to process and store the information. In fact in the weeks that followed concepts that were a blur before were clearer and manageable. Moreover, I think this was because everyday you learn a new feature or concept but they build on what you learnt in the past days. In any case if you're having difficulty with any topic there some very nice technical assistants that will spend loads of extra time helping you out with topics even out of class hours. During the last ten days of the course we had to make an website in a team of 4 people I met 7 weeks ago. It gave me a whole new perspective in terms of workflow. No matter how much theory you've learnt in class about how a team is supposed to work together it's a different case when you are applying those concepts in real life. I learnt that the most important thing in a team is good communication (from experience this time) and secondly a supportive atmosphere. I have done several team projects in the past but none of them gave me this sense of a satisfying environment. I really enjoyed my time at Le Wagon and would recommend it to anyone.

I was part of Le Wagon Batch #74... TLDR: it’s a life changing course to take.

Unlike most of my cohort, I didn’t use Le Wagon as an opportunity to change career and become a developer. Already working in the tech industry, I felt it was important to learn to code in order to understand product development more deeply and also what developers go through. I also wanted to get enough coding chops so that I could contribute to side-projects. In both of those areas the course was a resounding success.

In particular, Le Wagon London were great. Amazing teachers, great atmosphere, and a very product centric course meant we had a lovely time and learnt a ridiculous amount in 9 short weeks. It really was one of the most intense things I’ve ever done - they’re not kidding when they say 2 years of learning in only 2 months. What’s even better is that the overall opportunity cost is quite low; 9 weeks long and c. £6k.

Given the commitment, I’d recommend the course to anybody who’s even slightly curious. Technology is taking over the world and being able to understand/ do web development (a core technology stack) will be a huge help in future proofing your profile. It may even open your eyes up to an exciting career in web development that you didn’t previously think possible - the jobs are definitely there. Good luck!

Three months ago, there was Jules: a front-end web developer working remotely on CMS such as Wordpress, Prestashop..

Now, there is Jules from Le Wagon: a junior full-stack developer, who knows and understands what is under the hood :wink:

The truth is: I am that (new) guy.

I started with a few basic skills (html, css..), my clients were pretty satisfied but I was not.

My lack of knowledge was frustrating for me: what if a client wanted a website “from scratch”, how could I do if it required more skills than expected, especially if it involved the “back-end”? (the hidden part of a website).

To answer these questions, I decided I would find a way to improve my skills.

I talked about Le Wagon to some friends, and they were dithyrambic: just do it... if you can.

During the bootcamp, some of the most essential skills I acquired were to think and work as a developer, as well as to be able to understand the lines of code produced by other developers. It’s important as it shows you different ways of thinking and problem-solving.

This bootcamp is more than just an intensive 9-week coding program that teaches you all from programming to designing a web product, it’s a real family and an amazing tech community that you join. The teaching staff is very dedicated and helps you out throughout the whole length of the bootcamp.

I now have left my first career behind and I have started a new one as a freelance frontend developer. Of course I’m still in the middle of that path but I now know what I want to do and how I can achieve it. I’m also a Teaching Assistant at Le Wagon Paris now.

Therefore, if you want to know how to build your own digital projects to understand what a MVC model means, but also to be able to work and clearly communicate with developers to get things cleaned and done, I would recommend you this program.

Le Wagon batch#48 Paris

Le Wagon is clearly the best training experience I had in my life. The pedagogy is really perfect, pushing you into learning by doing and manipulating all the core concepts of programming by blocks that you later assemble to be able to create a project from A to Z. At the end of Le Wagon, you are autonomous to strengthen your knowledge in programming and learn new languages.
More than just acquiring pure technical knowledge, you also learn the best practices to work on a product-oriented web project with other people. The community is awesome and supportive, during and after the end of the bootcamp. You are part of a family and can find other alumni glad to help you out all around the world.

My name is Mathieu, I was part of batch#70 for 9 weeks which took place in Paris from April to June 2017. 

Before joining Le Wagon, I was already a student in computer sciences but I was looking for a faster way to get expertise and get a job .

A friend of mine, who had done the program, told me about Le Wagon and explained that he was designing a product and wanted to rise his start up shortly.

He told me his experience was awesome and that it would be for me a great opportunity that I should not miss.

During my interview, I felt confident and I felt like I was about to immerse myself into this place for 9 full weeks.

On the very first day, four of us got there one hour in advance, impatient and excited to start this new adventure. Those four people became subsequently my friends.
This experience was amazing, we have been supervised by Teachers and passionate Teaching Assistants. We were ready to give the best of ourselves. And we knew for a fact that they were going to lead us to success.

Sometimes, I even forgot to get lunch because of being too much focused on coding.
Despite the toughness of the first few weeks, our good mood and the share of our motivation, there was a pretty good atmosphere .

Every single day, you get to work with a different person which brought a rich social and human dimension to this learning experience.
Numerous meetups and afterwords were organised in order to make us get a deep dive into the tech world.

Afterwards, we learnt about databases, the Ruby Language and web front-end, then we finished the four last weeks with Rails that were, to my mind, the best weeks I have ever spent in my life!

The real difficulty was to learn how to code in groups as well as to respect the due date for the projects such as the Airbnb-clone.
I succeeded in joining a passionate group led by an artist whose project was called Let's Curate. The aim is to put artists in touch with each other so that they can organise an exhibition together.

Le  Wagon will remain in my memory forever. I learnt a lot of skills, I made a lot of friends but I also earned a family.

Nowadays, I am working in a Parisian Web Agency and as a junior Ruby on Rails Full Stack Web Developer.

I think that it was one of the best experiences in my life and I know it was hard but would do it again. You should try it as well. You won't be disappointed.

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.