Le Wagon

After a year and a half as a business analyst in a tech start-up I felt like I had a good understanding of our business and market. However as many of us with non-technical background, I was clearly lacking a certain number of skills in order to understand the development of our core product. I told friends about my very early mid-life crisis and met with someone who convinced me to go for Le Wagon’s bootcamp in Paris despite not having coded anything in my life. After the first few days, the fear of failing had completely vanished - Le Wagon somehow found the perfect balance between supporting students and teaching them to reach the autonomy they’ll need as junior developers. You also get to meet with awesome people who you will want to train with every day. Le Wagon is a family with such a great spirit that you always find a way to come back for one of their many community events.
After the bootcamp, I left my business analyst position and I quickly learned Python to work in data analytics.

I wanted to learn how to code for a few years before I joined Le Wagon. I tried to learn it myself by following online courses a few times, but each time I didn't manage to continue after a few weeks of trying. I actually already gave up on learning how to code until someone told me about Le Wagon. People were telling me that you will be able to build products only after 2 months. I was a little skeptical, because it sounded crazy, but then after talking with a few alumni I decided to give it a shot anyway, I just wanted to become a more technical product manager.    The 2 months at Le Wagon were very intense. We were covering new topics everyday. It was overwhelming sometimes because you often feel you haven’t mastered the topics from the days before yet and you are already learning something new. Because everyone was in the same boat, we were able to help each other out and learn together. I think Le Wagon does it very well in selecting good teachers. Our teachers were able to make ‘boring’ topics fun, which makes it easier for us to understand. The last 3 weeks were project based, when we could build our own products with a team. For me this was the moment to apply everything we had learned and to experience how to work together in a tech team. Le Wagon doesn’t only focus on teaching students how to writing codes, they really prepare you to be problem solving in the tech world.    Now after the camp, knowing how to code and being part of the alumni group, I feel that many doors have opened. The 2 months flew by so quickly and I was able to learn so many things in such a short time. For the people who are considering to join the camp, focus for 2 months, it is definitely worth it. 

I had a very positive experience at Le Wagon bootcamp. Before the camp, I was the general manager of a consumer electronics distribution company, and I was looking to diversify my skills and knowledge in order to take the company to a higher level. There was never a dull moment in the camp as each hour of each day was engineered for maximum learning, and there were more days than not when I felt stretched way beyond the edge of my capabilities, but there is always support from staff and classmates so you can't get too lost. The camp culminated with 3 weeks of working in a team of 4, which was the most challenging and intense but also the most rewarding experience in the whole camp. We made an easy to use app to help seniors in China to get together and dance in the local parks, which has always been a popular national pastime but offline for the most part. Our team enjoyed working with each other so much, we remain good friends despite living in different countries and we will even compete in two hackathons this summer as a team. To others who are considering to join Le Wagon, I would recommend doing the pre-work 100% with all your focus. It's long, it's hard, but on week one everything takes off like a rocket ship and you want to have as much under your belt as possible before the 9 weeks journey begins.

The Wagon bootcamp has been a real achievement.
I didn't even expect heading to such a great experience when I signed in.
I'm pretty sure It's not necessary to talk about the content, just come over and take the most of it; no matter what you want to do next : becoming a web developer, a product manager, an entrepreneur or just for your own culture…
In fact, everything here is about sharing tech skills and experiences, especially because everyone here has a different background. The staff is amazing, from the first day to the last, you're never left alone. Moreover, thanks to a very sharp program, it's affordable to everyone to improve his skills step by step.
I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone!

The curriculum  and the material provided are amazing: easy to understand, sharp, straight to the point and always up to date.

 

The first day, was probably the third time opening a terminal in my whole life, by the end of the bootcamp I was merging pull requests on GitHub and pushing my PWA on Heroku.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, that is exactly why you should join the bootcamp.

 

Every day, I woke up wanting to go to class, wanting to learn…9 days straight, not so easy to have this motivation in University. And what is best is that you are surrounded by people that have the save anger to learn, paired with passionate teachers and TAs that are seriously there JUST because they love what they are doing. They are seriously amazing in understanding what is bugging you, how can they make it clearer, and they can repeat it 1000 times.

 

You will start with Ruby, and by the second week you will be playing black jack against your laptop, then you might wander ok cool… but when will I move from the terminal, and that’s when they will teach you the front-end and the beauty that is on all the apps you are surrounded by, and you have no idea how they got created (you will, promised). And from there they will teach you a MVP is built, and then it will be your turn and you will challenging yourself to create something that is actually out there, on the world wide web, and it feels immensely empowering.

 

After seeing engineers working their magic, I thought it would have been almost impossible for me to understand what they were doing… then I found le Wagon.

First of all, for the first time in Le Wagon history, ever we had majority female than male ratio in this batch :) 

Prior to attending Le Wagon bootcamp, I was working as a data analyst and data engineer in a mid-size e-commerce company. I studied information system in university, as I’ve always had huge interest in anything tech, but was too intimidated to take on a full computer science major then.

While working in the data team, I was exposed more and more to the IT and programming world, and was looking to finally brush my fear aside, and dive fully into the technical world. I was looking at different big data analytics or data science programs, but felt I wasn’t ready to commit to a full-time one-year-long master degree. So I thought of Le Wagon bootcamp as a shortcut!

It wasn’t an easy decision, because I’ve worked for years in data field, and I felt like doing the full-stack coding bootcamp is a quite a big shift. But I think I stopped thinking of this after day 3 of the bootcamp.

I really enjoyed every single day of the camp, the instructors we had were really some of the most amazing, talented and passionate people in the industry, and they really tried to put down the textbook, and do lectures in the most entertaining and unconventional way! The format of the classroom is great, we’d have 1 - 2 hours lecture in the morning, and right after that we’d start doing our daily challenges with our buddy of the day.

I must say they’ve really found a way to teach non-technical people into building a full web product. Instead of looking at it as “learning how to code”, which can be demotivating sometimes when you feel like your brain is just not capable, they guide you pass the coding and straight on to the end goal: to launch a web product, YOUR own product, in just 9 weeks time. I remember what an awesome feeling it was, when we started being able to put the backend side and the frontend side together to complete a full product.

The bootcamp has really opened my eyes and a new path for me. At this very moment, I'm enjoying just coding and creating new products everyday, and it gives me freedom to work as a freelancer and getting involved in different startups. I still very much love data, and I think the skill I learned at the bootcamp boost my capability in different data engineering projects that I wasn't able to do before the camp.

Last but not least, Le Wagon has such an amazingly tight community of alumni and teachers, and these people are there to help each other post-bootcamp, whether to help with programming questions, or to give advice on projects and career, or to just share freelance opportunities with fellow graduates.

I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone!

I graduated as a Software Engineer in Belgium but before committing myself to a full-time job I wanted to have an experience abroad. So I joined batch #210 in Montréal and it was the best experience of my life!

Before the bootcamp, I wasn't sure if I was going to learn anything in the first couple of weeks, because those were all about the basics of programming. But boy was I wrong! My prior knowledge of coding gave me the opportunity to learn how to explain stuff that seems easy to me, to someone who never heard of it prior to the morning lecture of that day. And that definitely helped me to improve as a programmer. The bootcamp also provides optional challenges which are quite challenging, even for programmers with experience.

But as the weeks progressed, I realized that Le Wagon is about so much more than just coding. The bootcamp taught me a lot about teamwork, helping each other out, realizing what you don't know and how to let others help you with what you don't know. And most importantly it taught me how to transform an idea into a product you can proudly present in only 2 weeks with people you've only known for 1,5 month. That's the magic of Le Wagon!

Le Wagon has been an awesome experience. The teachers have been amazing and unbelievably supportive, I could slack them night or day and I know they would get back to me. As a future student, I’ve found Le Wagon to be a great step before University, the bootcamp has made me not only think more about what career I would like to do in the future but also think more about the business side of life. I now feel more like I’m learning with a purpose than just learning because I love the subject, which massively increases my motivation to learn about what I love. Post Le Wagon, I feel more prepared for life at University, the Le Wagon mentality is ‘work hard, play hard’ and that’s the philosophy I intend to take with me to University.

I attended le Wagon a year ago, and I'm so glad I did !

Le Wagon is a very intense learning experience, the first weeks especially are quite challenging. Yet, that's only because you are learning so much from it. 
The curriculum is very well designed, you're making immense progress throughout the 9 weeks. Because you're being paired with a different student every day, you're able to think through problems differently and to help each other grow. 
It's also a great social experience. You get to meet people from very different backgrounds with an entrepreneurial mindset.

What I liked about le Wagon, on top of everything, is that it's not just pure theory, there's also a real project at the end. It gives you great tools that you'll be able to use in your everyday job life. 
All the experience I've gained from le Wagon has been very useful to me in my product role. I definitely recommend le Wagon to anyone who has an interest in the tech scene and/or in a technical or semi-technical role.

Le Wagon is an extraordinary experience, 9 intensive weeks that pass at lightning speed. I am an alumni of the 200 batch 2018 in Paris.

After 6 years worked for Carrefour France, I always wanted to go further and understand what was happening behind the projects once in the hands of technology & developers. I was in charge of the ecommerce for the fresh products (bakery, fruits and vegetable, fish shop…).

For this reason and to facilitate my interactions with teams of developers, I decided to join Le Wagon.

A few months after the end of Le Wagon I joined xo7, a french startup, to be one of their product manager. In addition to that, I took the opportunity to create an online poster sales company just for fun.

I really recommend everyone to do this bootcamp: it's the best experience to train, progress, understand, launch your project, iterate, and calmly tackle any new project, not just technical. The quality and relevance of the training is a real plus, as is the alumni network and the global community of Le Wagon.

 

I wanted to stop working a 9-5 and start travelling as a digital nomad with my own project in the first place. I also wanted to improve my salary by switching to a development career and earn more.   Le wagon is a high quality program and there is a strong effort to make it as clear as possible and with a good order on the topics tough.   The experience was amazing and really eye opening to what I'm capable of learning in a short amount of time if I'm disciplined enough.