Le Wagon

Why a coding bootcamp?

Before joining Le Wagon, I worked in several industries: investment banking (Macquarie), sports retail (Decathlon) and e-commerce (Rocket Internet). I’ve always had plenty of ideas and I knew one day I would need to make at least... Read More one of them real. When I finally decided to quit my last job, it was to start a very personal project : Take Away Trips (www.takeawaytrips.com), a web app to help people create and share personal travel guides. However, I found myself in a very common position: I had the idea, but how could I make it real? There were three possible options:

1. Find a rocket science CTO to partner with me.
2. Ask some digital agency to do it for me.
3. Do it by myself.

The first option is the magic dream that never happens. The person I was looking for was actually the target of thousands of people like me. How can you be competitive with just an idea, to someone who receives thousand of « join me in the next unicorn company I want to create » propositions. After two months of active research attending meetups and asking my network, there was no doubt it was not the best option.

The second choice, eluding the fact that my pockets were not big enough to finance this option, had a big downside: speaking of a web startup, you are basically giving the ownership of your core product to someone else. On top of that, you can’t be fast and lean if the person who develops your app is not in the same room (even less if based in another country).

Finally, after considering 2) and 3) I told myself the best option was to learn how to build a dynamic website by myself. But indeed, how?

Why Le Wagon?

It is easy to get an idea of the learning curve at Le Wagon: there are dozens of hours of video records of Le Wagon’s alumni pitching live demo. Watching at them I told myself it really looked like what I was seeking: fast learning and best practices to be able to make, with real Ruby code, any idea for real in a minimum of time. The 2 month fullstack program at Le Wagon is clearly designed for entrepreneurs and I was very confident it was no bullshit. Simply because Boris, Romain and Seb, the three founders of Le Wagon are also entrepreneurs and they know how painful it could be to waste your time when you want to quickly ship a product.

The FullStack program

I applied to join #Batch 24 in Paris. First days of the program are clearly setting the scene: it’s going to be hectic but fun.

- Every day a new topic on which you can keep working from home thanks to a super well-made SaaS platform.
- Every day you get paired up with a different “buddy” to solve new challenges.
- Every day the same motivation because students at le Wagon really want to learn hence there is a very positive and uplifting atmosphere within the batch.
- And every day, teachers and teaching assistants are all available to give you best tips when you are stuck in your code.

During the two last weeks of the program, small groups of students work on their own startup projects. Then, the very last day of the program is the demo day where each team present the project they were working on. It is the ending point of 9 weeks of learning and it is such a great feeling to look back and tell yourself : I’ve learnt so many things in 2 months!

And now ?

We presented the project I had before joining the full stack program, [Take Away Trips](http://www.takeawaytrips.com/), during the demo day. Thanks to Le Wagon, I can now apply a lean approach to launch Take Away Trips for real. It looks clearly feasible to update the current version of the website and adapt features based on feedback of my first users. I expect to iterate this way for 2 months in order to get quickly a useable product. Hopefully, based on the upcoming new versions of my app, I will be able to raise funds to develop the activity and eventually be more legitimate to partner with a future CTO.

I strongly recommend Le Wagon to anyone who wants to start any web related project: this is the best way to really own your product and get on the right track in no time.

I just graduated from le Wagon 2 weeks ago (batch #24) and I can only encourage every aspiring entrepreneur to attend this awesome bootcamp. Here is a quick overview of my experience there.

The Jungle

Before joining Le Wagon, I worked almost 10 years in... Read More the cinema industry. I enjoyed it, had wonderful experiences, traveled a lot but something was missing. Besides my love for art, I was also a tech lover and my curiosity for the entrepreneur world was growing every day. I wanted to join the people who build the future and try to bring something better to this world.

It quickly became obvious that learning to code was the next step. I wanted to be able to prototype a product, talk with other developers, understand how the products that I love are made but even with strong motivation, learning from any online courses was discouraging me:

- What do I have to learn first?
- Why this language and not another?
- Why am I able to validate a course and still don't see how to even start building anything ?

I was stuck in the Jungle.

After reading some reviews of Le Wagon and checking their Youtube channel, I decided to join the course. What I have done in 9 weeks is beyond what I expected from the bootcamp. I don't think I could have done it alone even with a full year working on it.

The Program

Don't fool yourself, learning to code is hard. The first weeks were very rich of information, and sometimes frustration, but I was completely loving it! The secret of Le Wagon is somewhere here. Passionate teachers, exercises smartly spread to bring you step by step to the next keypoint. I took those 9 weeks like a journey and embraced the flow.

More than skills what you will learn is an approach and a way of thinking like an experienced developer. You will be able to work in team and unchain yourself from the traps where many beginners stay forever. Being supported by teaching assistants that know what you are experiencing because they all went through the program is also very clever.

The community, the future

Spending 9 weeks with people who share the same mindset and coming from many different industries is also a strong reason for attending Le Wagon. Your network will grow fast and open your future to many new routes. All the students share a culture that is empowered by tools like Slack and Le Wagon's platforms.

I also learned a lot about myself and now feel able to keep improving my coding skills. I can start from scratch any project and add new bricks to the solid base I have built during Le Wagon

I’ve graduated from Le Wagon batch #18, about 4 months ago. I am 30-year-old and I have been working intensively for the past 6 years. I felt a bit nervous about getting back to a classroom into an intense learning situation for 9 weeks straight. I had... Read More read and heard a lot about the intensity of the program and how demanding it would be. I had never been the best at school and I didn’t have any engineering background. In a nutshell, I didn’t felt like I had the best profile and I was feeling anxious. Despite all, I consider that graduating from the Le Wagon was the best thing that happened to me for a real long time. Here is why…

Getting back to learning mode and building a new skill

Once you graduate from university how often will you get a chance to dedicate yourself 100% at learning a new skill for 2 months straight? And yet, isn’t the XXIst century economy all about adaptability, continuous learning and building fresh skills?

Of course, each day at work brings its shares of learning in some sense. But putting your career on hold for a couple of months and dedicating yourself to something really new has the ability to reconnect with the incredible power of learning. By breaking up my routine, I quickly felt excited again by discovering new stuff and I wanted to share this excitement around me. It really reminded me that we should always keep a fresh mindset and we should always aim for the step learning curve.

Sheryl Sandberg once said “Build your skills, not your resume”. Well that is exactly what Le Wagon is all about.

Getting a 360 overview

How often do you learn to build a project from beginning to end all on your own? Professionally, I knew a lot of things before joining Le Wagon but I have never been competent enough in a specific field so that I could do it all by myself. In that sense, the full stack program, which goes through back end, front end and infrastructure topics, gives you an incredible feeling of freedom and independence.

On top of it, even if you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve next, or which job opportunity you are aiming at, I would strongly advise to go for a full stack / generalist bootcamp program. Coding is such a long run that, for me, it doesn’t make any sense to focus right away. You have the rest of your programing life to focus, so why rushing?

Finally, here are the 2 most common questions I get when people ask me about Le Wagon.

Do I need to have a clear project in mind in order to be efficient?

Absolutely not. In fact, I would think the opposite. People who showed up with an extremely specific project in mind tend to only see classes through this particular prism and might miss some things. Coming with no project enables you to get there with a free mind and get the best out of each and every classes.

Where do I stand when I finish Le Wagon?

Learning ruby is just like learning any spoken language: there is the theoretical part and the practice. I remember learning Portuguese listening to podcasts in the bus for months. When I got to Brazil, I had never spoken with anyone and hence no one understood a single word I was saying. I believe it would be the same for ruby.

Le Wagon makes sure that you have all the theory right and give you basis of practice. Some within the class pick up much faster than others but ultimately, the only thing that matter is what are you going within the next 6 to 12 months. Ultimately, I see coding a bit like poker: it takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. You will realize very quickly that it is impossible to learn all the coding tricks within 2 months but Le Wagon will guide you on how to find these tricks for the rest of your life.

I started Le Wagon in January 2015 (Batch #6). Before that I had been a corporate finance consultant at one of the « Big Four » for 4 years (right after graduating from HEC a French Business School). I had no engineering background at all.

Le Wagon is... Read More in my opinion the best European coding bootcamp and I'd advise anyone to take up the challenge. They have a unique way of teaching the technical skills you need to work in a tech startup. It's also a great option if you are considering to launch your own startup. After Le Wagon, though I had no computing background before joining the program, I was able to code from scratch and launch a web application and an iOS app. I got selected to demo the app at the 2015 edition of Challenge.rs (http://challenge.rs/) in Barcelona. Le Wagon's teaching gave me the possibility to code the POC that I had in mind.

## Now after Le Wagon
Now I'm a product specialist at Algolia (algolia.com), a startup that developed an extremely fast and relevant search engine for websites and mobile applications.

I started Le Wagon in April 2016 and I loved it!

| Work hard and challenge yourself |

I was working in a digital marketing consulting firm for 3 years when I started feeling the need to learn something new, something fresh. My job wasn’t fulfilling anymore,... Read More I felt I was missing something and I wanted a change. That’s when I thought “Why not coding?” So, I decided to join Le Wagon to work in a booming and challenging environment, to acquire technical skills and to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
The whole experience lasts 9 weeks but time flies when you love what you’re doing! Le Wagon has a top-notch approach that enables any student - no matter what his background is - to quickly learn the basics of front and back web development. The program is very well conceived; you spend enough time learning the core concepts of web development, you switch between back-end and front-end languages, you learn how to use frameworks, you work on a copy-cat of Airbnb’s website and you get to code your own web app during the last two weeks. The tools and resources we use are extremely efficient and built in-house by Le Wagon’s team which makes the learning experience even more interesting. But overall, I guess that people are Le Wagon’s best asset; the teachers are super smart, inspiring and dedicated to our success and the students are ambitious with a great positive mindset. You will never be alone at Le Wagon; the community is tightly-welded and enthusiastic; there is always someone for you when you need help – a student, a teacher or an alumnus.

| Learn more about yourself|

When I first started the program I had no idea that I would end up prototyping my own product, Matchee, a C2C web app to buy and sell clothes nearby. Honestly, my first two days at Le Wagon were kind of harsh, I wondered if I would be able to make it till the end. Again, the program is intensive, you should be ready to dedicate yourself to coding during 2 months but the challenge is worth the time and the effort spent!
The 3 last weeks of the program (copycatting Airbnb’s website + prototyping a product) were my favorites. Working in a team with other developer students is super challenging and rewarding. You learn a lot about yourself and you start imagining your future as a coder. I, for example, developed my MVP with 2 amazing guys who became real friends. We’ve managed to implement technical features in our web app that we’d never thought we’d be able to code before (tinder-like swipe/match, messaging functionalities…). I know that I would have never done so much in so little time without taking the course – big up to Le Wagon talented staff for that!

| And now, what's next? |
Joining a web native startup as a Product Owner working hand-in-hand with developers (they don’t impress me anymore <3) + improve the concept of my MVP to work on it as a side project. Le Wagon is definitely a life-changing experience!

A 5-star learning experience

Life-changing
I decided to learn how to code after getting really frustrated by not understanding and not being able to do what my developers friends and coworkers were doing. And I no longer feel that way - mission accomplished.... Read More
Efficient
If you've tried to learn to code by yourself, you will know that the learning curve is often pretty flat, you can easily get lost in the amount of content you find online. One huge advantage of the bootcamp is to focus on the useful tools and techniques.
Rewarding
The satisfaction of building something from scratch is immense. You'll learn enough to design an app, write the code and push to a production environment.
Intense
There is a lot to learn in 9 weeks, so the teaching speed is definitely fast. But, some sessions are reserved for students who don't feel comfortable yet with some concepts, to make sure nobody is left behind.
Long-lasting
You will develop a "developer mindset" - a mix of patience, autonomy and critical thinking. You will learn a foundation of concepts and methodologies to build on following the end of the bootcamp.

Focus on product

One of the focuses of the bootcamp is product. There is a class specifically dedicated to product management, but Product is not limited to that class...it is always at the core of the training.
What business problem are you trying to solve? Which core features should you develop first? What other products can you use to minimize the investment, increase efficiency? How can you improve your user experience design?
All teachers are not only very good at technical stuff but also very strong at product, which is awesome. It makes a difference - you don't only learn to build stuff, but also what and how to build.

After Le Wagon

There is a decent amount of students who decide to start their business right after Le Wagon. Some of them become junior developers and get hired right away. I was not planning on ever becoming a developer, but instead to keep growing in product management. After graduating, I had several opportunities to choose from in Paris and the US. A year later, Le Wagon is still definitely a huge plus. Not only does it looks good on a resume (probably the majority of my so-called hard skills), it also made me technical enough for it never to be an issue during my job search.

Work hard, play hard

Last but not least, the teaching team and students are definitely what makes Le Wagon so great. The group got together really fast and programming in small groups definitely helps learning from your peers.
Frequent happy hours, startup talks and meetups make the group of students and alumni connect with the local startup and tech community, which is incredibly valuable during and after the bootcamp.

★★★★★

TL, DR:

It changed my life. Removed the fear of not being technical— great friends and memories I will never forget.

I spent an entire year learning to code. I tried everything:

- Codecademy

- learn Python the hard way

- Coursera

- Code School

But I still... Read More sucked. I couldn’t even write a simple program. Was I stupid? Maybe.

But I decided to try a new approach and registered to Le Wagon after hearing great feedback. After 9 weeks, I was able to build Impact—a tool for retrieving and analyzing Twitter data. I even wrote one of the program’s main algorithms. Maybe not that stupid after all.

Le Wagon isn’t a course--it’s a life experiment.

BE WITH LIKE MINDED PEOPLE

Why is learning to code so hard? Because it’s lonely. Oh man, try to read documentation written by coders, for coders, when you’ve never been on those websites. It’s a pain. Nobody wants to help you—« READ THE F***ING MANUAL », they say—and it quickly gets discouraging. I don’t want more homework again.
But that doesn’t happen at Le Wagon—you’re not alone. You make friends. Each day, you are paired with someone from your batch—your buddy for the day. You don’t have any excuses for not collaborating and you’ll end up creating relationships with everyone in your class. You learn how to pair-program, how to help (and ask for help), and create long-lasting relationships. Many end up working together—some even start companies.

So no more loneliness, but a great environment to learn, meet and grow.

LEARN USEFUL STUFF BY DOING A LOT

The main problem with learning anything is putting in the required amount of intensity. I could have spent years learning code in a half-assed way, like I was doing. I would still not know how to code.

Le Wagon makes you DO stuff. To my great pleasure, lessons laster only one hour—the perfect time to give the essentials and keep everyone interested—and gave place to 8 hours of intense coding. Exercices, product-building, real-life challenges. They’re here to make you BUILD stuff.

Traditional education leaves you in the world without any skills. Le Wagon teaches you practical and professional-level skills in 9 weeks.

I couldn’t design a simple web page when I started. After 9 weeks, I could build AirBnB.

That’s effectiveness.

CHANGE YOUR LIFE BY KNOWING MORE ABOUT YOURSELF

We spend so much time speculating, fantasizing on our lives. Maybe I should have been a lawyer, I should have traveled more, I should have become a developer.

But there’s no way to know if you like something but trying it with a deadline and a lot of intensity. Le Wagon makes you grow as a person by increasing your self-awareness: it helps you know yourself better.

Do you like working in teams? You will know.

Do you like building tech products? You will know.

Do you want to be a software engineer, an entrepreneur, a product manager? You will know.

I wanted to code because I was scared I couldn’t be an entrepreneur otherwise. I didn’t know if I had it in me. I didn’t know if it was useful. I was fantasizing, again.

Then I spent 9 weeks coding all day. That’s 400 hours.

Now I know. If everything goes to flames, if my business fails and my girlfriend leaves me, if I’m expelled from my place and have zero friends left, I won’t be scared.

I found something I love doing. That’s worth everything.

Thank you Le Wagon.

Le Wagon is a great place to learn web development. You'll get two months and a half to learn web programming: from backend (databases with SQL, Ruby, ...) to frontend (HTML, animations with javascript, design with css). Teachers are patient and devoted,... Read More they will teach you the right methods and responses to adopt as a future programmer.
Every week you can also attend talks from entrepreneur and learn from there experiences.

I attended the Bootcamp of Le Wagon in Amsterdam. It was an amazing experience. Within three months I learned all the different steps of building a website: front-end, back-end, and working with the database. They use very creative methods to learn you... Read More how to code, without ever using any books. It was an amazing experience I am happy I took this unique experiences. I feel more confident now with my computer skills. They have very qualified teachers that help you develop on your own personal speed. Their buddy-system makes sure you enjoy peer-coding and you learn from other students. Definitely a recommendation to everyone, who would like to learn how to code.

I graduated from Le Wagon in May 2015 in Paris, and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone with even the most remote interest in coding.

I recently attended a Q&A with DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails, the web framework taught at Le Wagon), where he said:... Read More “Learn to code. If not to be a coder, then to understand the world.” Le Wagon is the perfect doorway to begin that journey.

My Background

After an amazing learning experience in high school, I was less than enthused with my university experience (liberal arts). So I quit after my BA and took a job at a big company. 4 years later, I grew tired of the corporate culture and handed in my resignation to do Le Wagon.

The Bootcamp

All I wanted from the bootcamp was learning to code. But what I got from the bootcamp was much more:

the Program: the program is excellently designed, both in pace and content. I really liked the no-nonsense approach to the material and the intensity was high but appropriate.
the Team: the team behind the program is a rare combination of technical and human skills.

the Network: with over 500 current alumnis and counting, the program keeps on giving beyond the 9 weeks it lasts. Whether you’re looking for a job or have a technical hiccup you need help with, the network has your back. Across 12 cities in 8 different countries.

the Culture: learning code is one thing. But the human experience is a huge factor for me, especially under intense working conditions.. And that was my favorite thing from Le Wagon: the optimism that permeated everything about the program. You leave not only with an arsenal of new tech skills, but with a new mindset. The mindset of someone who doesn’t stop until something is working exactly like you intended. The mindset of a coder, of an entrepreneur, of a “Wagoneer”.

Le Wagon is the best educational experience I’ve ever had, and I will always look back at those 9 weeks as defining both personally and for my career.