Le Wagon

I was one of the students of batch 4 in Paris (end of 2014).

Being a student at Le Wagon helped a lot for my career in tech. I had a growth marketing background and really needed to have a technical perspective to be better at my work.

First, the hard skills you learn over there are very valuable. I can now build MVPs with Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS by myself. I can also tweak websites - which is useful to implement tracking codes or make some changes on frontend for instance. 

Second, it enabled me to understand coding culture and to be able to collaborate efficiently with developpers. This is a substential strength during my everyday life at a startup. I am now able to be more relevant with my ideas that require technical work; being able use Github or to chat about APIs is also useful when you are surrounded by developpers!

Last, the people I met during the program are high quality. The students are mostly entrepreneurs and share a great mindset. The teachers are super smart & encouraging. Also, Le Wagon being embeded in the Paris startup scene, I met several pretty impressive founders (Algolia, Front, Sunrise...). 

In a word, Le Wagon enabled me to be more powerful as a person. I don't feel stuck by my lack of tech skills anymore. I definitely recommend this coding bootcamp!

Life changing experience, literally
Attending Le Wagon was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It really changed my life. I met great people, learned extremely valuable skills and found a community I will always be part of.

My classmates
One of the most enriching aspect of le Wagon (apart from the coding skills) was the opportunity to meet people with such fascinating stories; it didn’t take long for all of us to become friends. Everyone came at le Wagon with a different background and personality and discovering so many interesting people was an amazing experience. Lifelong friendships were forged, undoubtedly we’ll cross paths with each other at future jobs, and I’m even starting a company with two of them.

Teaching and staff
I am really grateful to all the teachers at le Wagon. They are the best instructors I have ever had. They don’t just give you the theory and exercises and then let you in the dark, oh no their method is well-structured to really get rid of pedagogical frictions and give you an "optimal" leaning experience. They have this ability to understand that each of us is a different learner and cater to the needs of each student.

But it’s not only teachers and every day, you can also rely on great teaching assistants (former students at Le Wagon) who help you every time you need and spend time to dig deep in your code with you.

Conclusion
Le Wagon not only gave me the knowledge but also gave me the opportunity to meet the people I work with every day. We continued after le Wagon and decided to create our company together. Everyday we keep learning and that feels good! Now that I know about coding I feel like I can address confidently any investors or tech guy because I know what I m talking about. For an entrepreneur it makes a big difference trust me!
You can take a look at our demo day here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SQFIIR0O8 at 14'10"

I’ve been a student at Le Wagon for the 9-week program in June 2015. I have been creating websites for 10+ years, but had almost no  backend skills and felt limited when I wanted to create more complex and intelligent things.   The program gave me exactly what I was looking for: an intensive ruby and rails course, best practices and tools, cool front-end tips. I am know able to do a MVP of any basic product in something like two weeks, which is an amazing skill to have I believe.   The other thing I liked a lot is the entrepreneurial/cool spirit. Students were open-minded and fun, and le Wagon’s team is always there to help and to drink a beer.   I kept strong links with le Wagon, working as a teacher assistant for the next batches and they even hosted my new company, Mangrove (www.meetmangrove.com) for a few weeks. This new venture feels like a logical path after le Wagon, keeping some of the same spirit and using skills I learned during the 9 weeks. 

Hi,

I finished Le Wagon a year ago doing their 6th batch and this was the biggest (and coolest) shift in my life. Here are some details about Le Wagon.

 

Intensive and focused on best practices

The curriculum is really challenging. Some stats to illustrate my point: you get to learn five different "languages" (ruby, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL) not to mention the libraries and frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, jQuery, React). The pace is fast and you've got to work hard, with 50 hours of code per week to really benefits from the program. In addition to the great courses by experienced teachers, Le Wagon has developed internal tools and learning platforms (with lectures and videos) that help you digest best practices and be autonomous at the end of the 2 months.

Startup ecosystem

9 weeks is short but enough to dive deep in the world of tech startups and adopt this culture.

I was a perfect newbie and I easily became "startup-fluent" through contact with Le Wagon ecosystems, through meetups, talks, and workshops organised every week.

I loved going back to school and to fill in a batch atmosphere with coding buddies who became real friends spending my whole time with us during this 9 weeks. Le Wagon builds a great community of alumni and I enjoy being one of them. We take pleasure to meet each other through Le Wagon weekly events or around a beer.

Great Program, Great Staff, Great Projects

I discovered a high-quality curriculum built like LEGO where each piece improves and completes the previous one, and where you always code a library by yourself before we give you the built-in tool for that. Morning courses are provided by great teachers. Sometimes a bit fast (event if 1h30 long) but then you get helped by awesome teaching-assistants during the day. The last 2 weeks of the program are dedicated to coding your own project and the results are just great: https://www.lewagon.com/fr/alumni

Learn to code, boost your profile, change your life

Students come to Le Wagon with different goals, choose yours. I was private-teacher in Mathematics, Physics and Biology during 5 years after a Master degree in Marine Biology. When a friend told me I should follow Le Wagon fullstack program, I thought that would be cool to add this skill to my teaching offer, and why not start doing some freelance dev with it.

So I enrolled it and it really changed my life. One week only after the end of the bootcamp, I was already working on freelance missions for a startup. After a year of code for different projects like thepixeler (a digital artwork sharing platform), MaShareEcole (the school network for parents in France) and MissionBiberon (a MOOC for parents having babies), etc.. I finally joined Le Wagon as an official teacher and developer.

As I told you, very cool life shift.

The objective of Le Wagon is to teach its students how to code, and how to code well. As a result of this, students learn programing by communicating with each other while working on projects, and ultimately creating a rich ecosystem of knowledge that iteratively builds upon itself, week after week throughout the 9-weeks.

Le Wagon has been one of the best investments I have ever made. I build the 1st version of my startup "MedPics" thanks to Le Wagon and I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to learn codes and begin a start-up.

I was batch #02. It's seems a long time ago now !
2014 you remember ?
At the time I wasn't even aware how this bootcamp would change my life forever.
As a filmmaker I was even convinced that coding was not only a boring activity but also something very rigid. I couldn't be more wrong. What I learned at Le Wagon gave me super powers. The way they teach programming challenged my brain. Sometimes I even felt like I won't make it, but the staff was awesome and they never let me down. At first, I struggled to understand the point and seeing the big picture. Learning, ruby, object oriented programming, building an ORM or an MVC from scratch wasn't making no sense to me. It was like getting LEGO blocks without knowing what they would be useful for. But the staff was like they knew what they were doing, so I stayed confident and eventually a few weeks later I started to experiment a series of thoses orgasmic AHA moments. Then I realised how creative programming could be. Now, I'm confident coding any MVP project I can think of. I feel like it's a whole world of opportunities out there for people like me who never opened a Terminal window before. I keep on learning with the Alumni Meetups and by being a part-time teacher assistant at Le Wagon. The curriculum and the tools to learn that are given to the students are even better know. Sure if you come at Le Wagon you will learn to code the hard way but this is the right way.

Hi ! I was one of the students of batch #11 in Paris (07/2015 - 09/2015) and I worked as a Teacher Assistant at Le Wagon. Here's a fact-based review of the full-stack training.   TL;DR   Life changing. Le Wagon + (whatever your background) = <3. After Le Wagon, I've worked as a back-end developer at Brand And Celebrities, a Paris-based celebrity marketing platform for the past 6 months. I'm now moving to the San Francisco to work at Scalr, a cloud management platform.   Why Le Wagon ?   As a business school student, I suffered from two pains :

• I had product ideas, but I couldn't realize them or either test them because I was not really able to code.
• I felt like my business school degree wouldn't be enough to land my dream position / found a company. I was missing out on something.

The folks at Le Wagon solved these two pains. Because of its focus on entrepreneurship, Le Wagon is not yet another coding bootcamp. It's the best training for any aspiring entrepreneur.   The 9 weeks - What I Learnt   At the end of the 9-week program, I was able to :

• Clone within one week Airbnb and pitch our product MVP in front of the community.
• Upgrade my skills through online resources way easier than before (I never completed an online tutorial before attending Le Wagon).
• Have conversations with experienced developers or engineers, understand their mindset and work with them.

At the end, you'll be fully proficient in Ruby. You'll know how to shape up your website with the latest trends in front-end development. You'll be a master of Rails, the framework behind SoundCloud, Airbnb, Shopify & GitHub. You'll build a business in an afternoon thanks to APIs. You'll experience coding as a team with Git & GitHub. You'll feel the stress before the final production release.   Disclaimer : You'd better be prepared.  Do as much as you can before you actually start the training to avoid missing the boat. Learning how to code is absolutely engaging, but it does require a lot of hard work. I found myself coding ~ 75 hours / week. And loved it.   The People   Your network is your net worth.   I've had the chance to meet amazing people during and after the 9-week training. Since I also worked as a Teacher Assistant, I can tell you you'll never be alone. There's always someone to give you a helping hand, whether it might be a buddy, an alumnus or a teacher. The background of  the participants is incredibly diverse : businessmen, artists, designers, architects, lawyers, engineers, ... We've been having monthly reunions with the folks of my batch. I was co-opted as a back-end developer by a Le Wagon alumni. I'm going to work with a friend from my batch. We have an alumni platform where we can ask for help, find job, and find resources. You can attend to monthly meetups about code (like Paris.rb) or entrepreneurship (Le Wagon Meetups). Its community is really what makes Le Wagon stand out.   So is it worth it ?   Absolutely. Le Wagon's been a game-changer for me. I would never have done so much in so little time without it, and I could never be more thankful to the staff for that.

I was one of the student of Le Wagon Batch 10 (https://www.lewagon.com/program) in Paris in June 2015.

Where to start ?

Well, let's start with the course: The 2 month bootcamp is just perfectly balanced, well paced and it covers everything I need to bootstrap m project. You start with the core of class programming, you then discover DB management and the MVC pattern. I found the exercices well designed, they suited my learning curve. We then spend 2 weeks on front-end development, spending time on important front-end pattern (layout, flexbox, component design) and javascript/ajax techniques. Once everything is set up, we discovered the rails framework and then each lesson focus on a very pratical aspect: user management (devise), facebook connect, geocoding, mailing. Each day was really rich!

The 2 weeks project

The last 2 weeks are focused on coding your project in team. You can join a team or propose your project to other students. I wanted to start my startup project and so I did! Once again, great experience! Teachers and teacher assistants helped us to work as a team, to develop good habits on GitHub. We had a series of things we wanted to do that we hadn't seen during lessons: No problem, the coaching staff were just happy to help us on specific notions and problems. In addition, I also benefit from "product" oriented coaching and pitching advices.

Community

Spending 2 months with 30 other students, working hard, helping each other is an amazing experience... At the end of the bootcamp, you just don't want to stop gathering evryday and learning together... I feel like, it's the same thing for each batch. At the end of the day, the community just grows stronger and bigger! For every new project, you get tons of feedbacks and helps, job opportunnities are passed between each others, new resources are quickly discussed, etc. The community is just great during and after!

To finish this long review... I DO recommend this 9 weeks program, it enabled me to start my new company (http://www.openloge.fr), to take freelance missions, to meet great people and to just enjoy time working.

Learning to code should be mandatory. It's beginning to be taught in colleges and highschools across the globe, and those of us who don't get on board now will find themselves in a sticky situation in the not-so-far future.

Having lived in the US and being exposed to their tech culture, I believed I had to join one of the well known bootcamps over there to acquire the necessary skills to become a developer. Thankfully, a friend recommended to join the Wagon and I decided to give it a try. Now, a couple of weeks after the end of the course, I can say it has been the best step I could take at this point of my life.

Not only have I learned the necessary skills to confidently start off in a company as a junior developer, I have also been provided with the right tools and mindset needed to continue learning independently after the course. Add to that a great alumni network, where everyone is always eager to help out and contribute to the growth of the community, and you have the recipe for an amazing coding bootcamp.

I highly recommend Le Wagon to all fellow aspiring developers, you are about to embark on the journey your career had been waiting for ;)

Le Wagon has an amazing approach of teaching, based on intensive training and exercises all day long, led by a fantastic team of teachers and TAs. I've always been passionate about the start-up world, but always frustrated not to be able to code, or understand it. 

Now, thanks to this 9-week intensive program, I can build a website from scratch, and the skills I acquired are absolutely precious. I never thought I would be able to achieve so much in 9 weeks.

So I can say without hesitating that applying for the fullstack intensive program was the best investment I've made so far.

I've joined Le Wagon fullstack program from January 4th to March 4th 2016.

The program is solid and proven. Each brick of the web stack is carefully taught, and it's a pleasure to see along the program why you've been struggling so much to respect coding conventions and rules. Learning platforms and support are top level and very easy to use.

Lots of teacher assistant are former student from Le Wagon and are somehow the best people to help us, as they used to be at the same place by the past and understand perfectly the problems one might be struggling with. It's also very cool to have their feedback and experience from "after Le Wagon" and see what they've achieved!

The overall atmosphere during the camp is unbelievable, and you truly feel you're being part of a big united team. The staff is awesome and always seeking to improve the overall experience at Le Wagon. 

I deeply recommend Le Wagon to anyone wanting to learn how to code, and how to code well!

here are my take aways of this bootcamp: 

- teachers are amazing > passionate about teaching, impressive skills

- the program is very well balanced between front & back end > you really get a 360 deg tour of what's needed to know to bootstrap your company and/or work with developers efficiently and/or start to work as a junior developer.

- the community of previous students impressed me > people are nice, always eager to help out / advise le Wagon students. I really feel i joined an ecosystem with people working in all fields within the internet industry, rather that a simple collection of people. I hope i'll take the best out of it.

- learn how to learn & think as a developer > the program has a great focus on providing you with all the best practices. I feel i can now be an independant learner & keep a steep learning curve.

 

next steps for me:

1. bootstrap my own web project (ecommerce)

2. coming back to my previous company as a product manager (big US startup) // i was a biz dev previously