Le Wagon

I finished LeWagon's 9-week bootcamp in Sao Paulo two weeks ago and finally had a little bit of time to reflect on the experience. What follows is a brief account of my time there, what I think I got out of it and why I think people interested in programming, web/mobile development and entrepreneurship should do it.

  To put this in context, I will tell you a little bit about myself. I have a economics and finance background but early on decided that I was more interested in entrepreneurship than banking or consulting. My first real professional experience was in Latam, developing a project for nearly 3 years but eventually I got to a point where I no longer had much to learn and decided to take some time off to travel.    While travelling I realised that what I enjoyed the most was the product side of business. Whether developing new features client side or thinking about infrastructure and data analysis, I wanted to be a more technical person. I tried learning online and at first I thought I made good progress but as soon as I got passed the easy tutorials and actually wanted to build things I started getting stuck and found it more and more difficult to move forward.   After quite a bit of investigating I decided on doing LeWagon's program. I really think I could not have made a better choice. The program has the right balance between theory and practice but what really made the difference were the great teachers and TA's at your disposal so you never got stuck for long and could keep learning at a fast pace.   The group of students also really contributed to the experience. Bright people from diverse backgrounds and the format of the course allowed us to really create a bond and learn from each other. The bootcamp at LeWagon allowed me to really dive into the world of code and gave me the tools to keep on learning. Now, I am working as a Product Manager for an Android app and the foundations that I learnt at LeWagon are what made it possible.   So whether you want to be a web or mobile developer, a product manager or a tech entrepreneur, whether you are interested in data, backend or design, LeWagon is for you. You will jump start into all these fields, put them all together to see how they fit and will learn how to teach yourself whatever you want to learn.

What I have gone through during my 2 months @ Le Wagon is priceless. There's no place for bullshit, it's just code ! I have learnt (and you will too) the best practices of the industry to build whatever you wish the best/fastest way possible, with the best technologies available (mostly for free) to you.

Le Wagon is the most demanding training I have ever done but also the most rewarding and fulfilling in terms of stuff learnt and people met. You learn something new everyday, if not every hour of the training, and the start-up mindset of the batch is greatly motivating. The lead teacher has 10+ years experience in coding and he knows everything about nearly everything.

Get in touch with them for more info, they are very responsive, helpful and friendly. If you're ready to change your life of course !

I read a cool article a while back, about how coding schools are the new MBAs. Just to be clear, I've never liked the idea of an MBA, especially in Brazil where I thing they're really shallow in their coverage of key topics, instead aiming to attend all types of backgrounds, and in so doing attending none of them fully.

So, I thought long and hard on that, and wanted to really learn something, make my brain work in a way that it wasn't used to. So I stalked the author of that article, Mat Le Roux, who had quite a CV on him, and seemed like he knew what he was talking about, and seemed to be saying the same thing that I was thinking.

Looking at his profile, I saw that Le Wagon was launching in Brazil and that coding really would be something new for my brain, unlike seeing discounted cash flows for the nth time.

After a quick talk with Mat at Le Wagon, São Paulo, I decided to take the plunge, and try go from zero to coder in nine months  weeks. The catch line was brave on their part, I didn't believe it really, I even thought they'd paid people to write these reviews, it's impossible that everybody only says good great things about Le Wagon. So I paid to see. And am glad that I did.

Classes start at 09:00 everyday, and involve two hours of learning the key concepts of web development. From ruby (and programming in general) basics like loops, to APIs and ReactJS. These classes are followed by brain breaking tasks during the rest of the day with your buddy based on those principles, luckily the teachers, and teaching assistants are there when you need a hand.

I'm not going to write everything down here, you can check out the program here if you want a deeper view.

All-in-all, I'm extremely satisfied with the outcome, the last four weeks, me and my buddies put up two great projects, Doacare and NuMooh, the latter of which we're building out as our own little startup.

So, I highly recommend Le Wagon, or any course where you can find a team as dedicated as theirs to getting you to this level with confidence.

 

 

 

 

 

A little heads up on my background, I am a trained engineer and spent 5 years in one of the biggest construction company with a very comfortable position, the kind of position that gets you sleepy up until you retire. No stimulation, no meaning, no adventure.

So I decided to stop the brainwashing routine of Subway / Job / Sleep and leave for another life where retirement is not the Holy Grail, the kind of life Gary Vaynerchuck describes in “Crush it”. YOU ARE the only captain on board, no one should decide how to run your life but you!

It was not an easy decision, you always know what you lose, and never what you’ll get for sure. But if, like myself, you’ve always been passionate about innovation, discovery, creating stuff, travelling, with a geeky side and a knack for new challenges, look no further, Le Wagon Brasil is just for you! Of course you’ll need a little money on the side, the program is not free, but far from expensive if compared with the value you’ll get, trust me.

 

Le Wagon is an awesome bootcamp as other reviews will tell you, but why make it in Brazil? First, you need to know how amazing Brazil is as a country and a culture. Awesome weather, beaches accessible every weekend from São Paulo, and an extremely welcoming culture of people willing to make you fall in love with a lifestyle full of music, churrasco and optimism. Yes the country can be dangerous, but no, you are not going to be attacked on every street corner.

I could not tell you why you should join Le Wagon in Europe, but I can tell you why do it in Brazil. The team is really awesome, the teachers are passionate, with true pedagogical skills and the overall atmosphere is the right combination of motivation and fun. That’s how the magic works. I had no previous coding experience and in the last 2 weeks, I could create this (http://www.calendr.io). Even if I didn’t speak Portuguese, I had online videos accessible during the morning masterclasses and as everyone speaks English in the team, I could ask anything anytime I needed it. And since 80% of your time is devoted to building stuff, I ended up asking a lot of questions about what I could do…

What’s next? I’ll be sticking around in Brazil to improve my Portuguese for sure. But thanks to Le Wagon’s network I heard about an opportunity to work as a developer in Jusbrasil, a startup of Salvador in the promising legal space. The company just received a massive investment from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and as I flew there on a weekend for an interview, they gave me a chance to join their team based on my bootcamp curriculum. I still have a lot to learn for sure but one thing I know for sure is that I won’t have many conversations about retirement there :)

 

Coming from a business background, I founded a crowdfunding startup during my final year in business school.  At that time, I was spending lots of time writing specs and user stories for the developer company we were working with. Our relationships with their developers were great but each product iteration was way too long. For this reason, I decided to get more involved in product development by joining Le Wagon. The skills I acquired enabled me to challenge developers and introduce a lot of good practices into our workflow and development process.

The program has two key strengths:
- A very demanding curriculum that teaches in-depth programming basics and software architecture
- A very hands-on approach focusing on product development's methodology and workflow (heroku, git, etc.)

I feel like the coding bootcamp industry in Europe is getting crowded. Le Wagon main strength lies in its solid program that teaches both essential technical skills and a strong product mindset.

I completed my studies in one of the tops french business school in Paris (ESCP). After five years of business school I decided to start my own company but I figured out quickly that I was massively lacking technical skills. I didn’t know how to work with a developer and had literally no idea on where to get started to build my product. So I just bought a few books and put myself at work. 

While I was starting my coding journey I attended a few workshops from Le Wagon which helped me a lot to grasp basic but essential concepts. I found the team very talented at explaining technical things and the program really appealing so I decided to apply too the nine weeks bootcamp.

The curriculum had very high standards and everyone (students and teachers alike) were really involved into it. I met a lot of great people during the class and 2 years after graduating from the bootcamp I’m still in touch with most of them. 

After nine weeks of learning there was no way for me to go back into a business school oriented job, I wanted to code, and nothing else. Thanks to le Wagon CTO I found a I started a job the week after the end of the bootcamp. That’s how my professional coding journey got started. Since then I’ve worked for two other companies.

Le Wagon gave me the skills I needed to get legit as a junior developper, create values for the companies I’ve worked for and keep on improving my skills at breakneck speed. In addition to pure technical skills, le Wagon also provides strong guidelines and best practice that helped (and still helps) me getting integrated in development teams. The emphasis on code quality and team workflow is really strong, and it turned out to be really really helpful in real life coding experiences (jobs, hackatons, side projects…)

Thanks le Wagon and its team I’m currently a happy developer, alway keen on learning new stuff, and who will probably keep on coding for a few decades at least!

In a previous life, I have been a consultant in management and organisation. After almost 6 years in this job, I decided to quit because I wasn’t entirely happy : I was looking for something more concret, and that would make more sens for me. Since I can remember, I’ve alway though I would become an entrepreneur.
At the same time I quit my job, my brother opened a restaurant in Paris. As he did not have a strong management culture, I decided to help him and I took part in the adventure. I built for him a few tools that unable him to have an accurate vision of the restaurant activity. While I was working on these tools and fighting with Excel VBA, I discovered that I liked coding very much.
It’s at that time that I heard about Le Wagon. I though it could be a good idea to learn how to make web apps, and see if web development was as exiting as I expected it to be. It would eventually allow me to develop ‘real’ tools for restaurant managers, based on my experience with my brother. And finally, I was really exited about joining a new environment with many entrepreneurs.

As soon as the program started, I knew I had made the right choice ! And that impression has never changed.
1. the place is great !!
2. My fellow student ? they are very different : some are young, some are older, some are still at school, others have children, there are lawyers, journalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, advertisers, accountants, etc. There are even girls !! During the 9 weeks of the bootcamp, thanks to the organisation of the program (every day you have a different buddy and there are many events where we can learn to know each other), we have created very strong relations. 4 months after the end of the program, we still see each other a lot.
3. the rhythm is great. Even if a day at Le Wagon lasts 10 hours, it’s build in such a way that it passes really well ! They have found the right balance between theory and practice, and between working alone and in group.
4. the teachers are good, they know where to start and where to stop in order to make us progress step by step. Everybody is really pleasant and patient.
5. The pedagogic materials are really great. Courses are very well made : the slides are really clear and accurate, and you can access at any time to the video of the morning lecture. The exercices that we work on from 10h30 to 17h30 are challenging et fun.
6. The events organized by Le Wagon are really inspiring : great entrepreneurs come and share their experience with us.
To summarize, I’d say that when you enter in Le Wagon, you enter in a community. Then, during the 9 weeks, you address many different subjects and the program is really rich. But everything is made to give you the keys to understand all these new concepts and to be able to go further on your own if you want. Finally : it really works, I can testify that after attending the whole cursus, you really are able to create complexe web apps !

After Le Wagon and for the last 5 months, I’ve been working on Vendome Society : it’s a new market place where professional jewelers can sell their second hand jewels. I’ve developed the whole platform by myself. I will be launched in September in France. After that, I’ll work as a freelance with a few of my ancient buddies from batch18. Working together enables us to benefit from each other’s network, to help each other and have fun which is very important in every job. At the same time, I’ll work on my own project : building a web service for restaurant managers.

My time at Le Wagon Brussels has been a truly transformational experience!
Honestly put, I did not expect to harvest so much learnings from these 9 weeks.
I came in with the aim of developing a web platform for a non profit I launched with some friends, as the cost-benefit of taking some weeks off to learn and develop the platform myself outweighted the option to have it developed by an agency/developer. During the bootcamp, I succeeded in going live earlier than expected, having already a fully operational platform by the time of the final demo day (see www.fovento.be).
But besides learning the coding skills, what has proven very valuable for me is the entrepreneurial spirit all along the way! I actually quit my job right after the bootcamp, feeling empowered by all this good vibe and the newly acquired skills. Now I'm launching a SaaS company, building heavily on knowledge and capabilities gathered during the bootcamp. This great atmosphere is only made better by the great team running the camp in Brussels. These have been very fun days, like a reminiscence of past erasmus stays abroad :) I strongly recommend Le Wagon Brussels to anyone still hesitating about it - just apply and see for yourself!

## How I joined Le Wagon

 

I first heard about Le Wagon discussing with my friends about new startup ideas and essentially the frustration of not being able to prototype those ideas myself. One of them told me that I should have a look to Le Wagon. Fortunately all the requirements / availability were fulfilled and I joined the fullstack program from April to June 2016.

 

## The FullStack program

 

What a time I had! 9 weeks of intensive training with a learning curve that I have never experienced before, even coming from one of the best French engineering schools. The methodology and the staff around make this new world of code and web development very pleasant to get into.The curriculum is smart and progressive, and you've got access to a great pedagogical platform with courses' videos and slides. Very convenient to rehearse during evening and weekend, or to watch some courses again after the 9 weeks. The feeling of improvement is continuous along the program. I really feel learning all these skills would have taken me years on my own.

 

Now that I have finished the program, I feel skilled enough to build a first version of any of my ideas (well, let's say 99% of my ideas, because I can have some crazy ideas sometimes!). Whenever I am facing an obstacle there is always the alumni community to help, which is also the great strength of Le Wagon in my opinion.

 

Altogether this makes Le Wagon one of the best and the most valuable experiences in my education.

Before Le Wagon

As a product manager in a web startup I was working with developers and had always been dreaming about becoming one. So I was helping them coding a bit of HTML and CSS, sometimes some PHP, but couldn't really get further. As many aspiring developers, I spent quite some time on various coding MOOCs, but after a few months, kept feeling dissatisfied with my level as I was unable to code anything significant and was lacking a real teaching structure. At that point, I was about to give up my coding aspiration. That's when I heard about "Le Wagon" from a friend of mine.


Learning @ Le Wagon

I've just finished batch #24 of Le Wagon two weeks ago. To put it mildly, it's been a life changing experience.

When I joined Le Wagon, I had the feeling that I knew a few things about web development, but had no idea how to put them in practice and was feeling totally lost when confronted to the amount of things I had to learn. Therefore, on a given "learning day", I would spend a great deal of time just trying to decide what to learn.

At Le Wagon, I just went in and focused on the material, completely trusting the program in place and the teachers. What a relief it was just having to focus on learning things. Oh, and the result also was spectacular. The whole teaching program has been structured and organised so that everyone gets home in the evening with a new piece of knowledge. From Ruby to Javascript, to HTML/CSS, and up until Ruby on Rails, everything flows and comes together piece by piece. As for myself, it also allowed me to understand many things I had learnt (but not really understood) on the MOOCs before Le Wagon.

Two weeks before the end of the program, just when everything comes together, you start building "real life" projects. You reuse everything you've learnt up until now and still catch up with new things along the way. At this point, I think the results speak for themselves, so I let you have a look at the "demo day" of these projects : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUVEoYr6bA (mine was "Yfebo", second last in the video).

Keep in mind that most of us didn't know a single thing in development two months before that presentation.   Last but definitely not least, Le Wagon allows you to meet great people from the staff, to the teaching assistants, to the students. People with a strong desire to learn, build things, improve, start again. And that also in itself is invaluable.     After Le Wagon   I am currently working as a freelance developer mainly for a Saas company (http://www.yusofleet.com/), and my focus for 2016 is to capitalize on the great kickstart I had thanks to Le Wagon, learning new stuff and improving my skills in web development. Six months ago, I would not have believed you if had told me that I would be web developper within 6 months; and although I still have many things to learn, Le Wagon made it possible for me to start that new journey. 

I was one of the students of the 24th batch of Le Wagon in Paris. After many weeks of search and questions to people having “graduated” from Le Wagon and other bootcamps, I finally took the decision to enrol.

It’s probably one of the best professional decision I’ve taken so far. It enabled me to learn so many things within such a short period of time. I never believed it was possible to learn so much in just 2 months! Their curriculum is extremely fine tuned and we can feel that there has been a lot of iterations to reach such a level. You’re extremely challenged without feeling drowned under too much information.

I did Le Wagon not to become a developper, but to add more tools to my Marketer toolbox and to have fun developing small side projects. I strongly believe that this bootcamp is suited for many different profiles: the marketer who wants to be able to communicate with the engineering team, the wannabe entrepreneur who wants to build a MVP to attract technical profiles, the engineer who wants to have a strong web culture, or just someone who wants to build strong foundation to become a junior developper. I’ve probably forgot many other profiles but you get my point.

One of the big pluses of Le Wagon is also the people you’ll meet there. So many different backgrounds! This creates a wonderful effervescence.

I’d strongly recommend Le Wagon to anyone serious about learning great foundations of web development.

Have fun!