Le Wagon

Being an economist, I had a big interest in data science and started to try to learn a bit by myself. I wasn’t very successful and decided that it would be better to learn with other people. Le Wagon seemed like the best choice. Even though the program focuses on web development, I felt it would be best to get a good grasp on programming before looking specifically at data. I applied for Batch #97 in Lisbon and managed to get in and join this great community.

It was a very intensive 9 weeks with a very sharp look at ruby and web-development. As a newcomer, it was amazing to start understanding how software works, how websites I use on a daily basis are structured and created, and actually create one by the end of the bootcamp. Classes focused on the practical side of how to use code as a developer and we were given the tools to look deeper and understand some of the underlying mechanisms of ruby and rails. Always working in pairs gave us a great way to learn with other people and understand how collaborative programming actually is.
During the bootcamp, I had the opportunity to talk with a lot of tech companies in the Lisbon Ecosystem and attend several talks on all issues tech.

During the bootcamp one of our lead teachers told me of a job opportunity at Landing.jobs, a Portuguese start-up. I had interviews and technical challenges and in the end I got the job!

It is very weird how much my life changed since I entered Le Wagon. Nowadays I’m fixing bugs and developing features that are actually being used by people. Before the bootcamp, I knew nothing about coding and was looking for opportunities in economics and now I’m actually a programmer learning more at a great company and with the tools to explore the world of programming.

No matter how prepared to rock your bootcamp experience you might think you are, Le Wagon’s intense 9-week program will put you in your place rather quickly. This shouldn’t stop you from enrolling if you are very new to programming, but once you apply, take each of your pre-bootcamp days very seriously, you will be grateful to yourself for that later.
I studied in Tokyo, and it was an unforgettable experience. All teachers and teaching assistants are very different in their backgrounds and approaches in how they tackle programming challenges, which proved to be extremely useful. You'll be continuously pushed to go an extra mile, so not only your programming skills but your work ethic will skyrocket at Le Wagon as well.
Best of luck to you, Paul and Sylvain, in continuing to make Le Wagon Tokyo such a great place!

Verdict: Worth the Investment

The Three Things that matter most: 

1. Learning Fundamental coding concepts that for most (including myself), would be impossible to learn independantly. 

2. An Alumni Network that will work wonders in the future, including the network for getting a job on course completion. 

3. Le Wagon is not an Educational factory that churns out Students, but is one that cares about developing every student, according to their needs. (Some students just get coding, others take longer - Le Wagon can accomidate both types). To put it simply, they care about Student Outcome's over Revenue. This is special. 

What Le Wagon is: 

1. A place to learn fundamentals of programming. A foundation where you can be confident that with time and cotinuious self-improvement, you can learn anything.

What Le Wagon is not: 

1. A one-stop shop to learn everything there is to learn about Development. You will be able to code, you can develop applications but continious self-improvement is needed to become a real developer beyond coding. As with anything, there is no quick fix. 



 

I studied chemical engineering and was working in logistics before joining Le Wagon in Lisbon.

I decided to quit my job and start learning how to code because I love math and logic and I was tired of my day to day work being so far away from that.  I joined Le Wagon because of the excellent reviews given by a friend of mine who did the course before and, now, I couldn’t agree more. 

It is very well structured.  Each day consists of one morning lecture (1h30);  then Exercises and at the end of the day, live-code.

The lecture prepares you for the exercises that you’ll do with a coding buddy. Each exercise is a challenge but much easier with this buddy system because it works as an exchange of knowledge between the buddies, and also because many times you think you don’t know how to solve an exercise but you just have to start talking with somebody to find out the solution. When this is not enough you always have teachers to help you.

The bootcamp is really intense and you learn so much in such a short time that in the last 10 days you are build alone with your team an app from scratch!

On top of this great structure, it is an amazing team of talented teachers always available to explain to you once more! 

In my opinion this is the best way to start over in the tech world: through this intensive course in a school with real evidence of successful students. 
This course will guide you from the basics to a stage where you can start developing by yourself.

I attended Le Wagon’s batch #122 in Lisbon last winter. The course is intense and often challenging, as it is really fast paced (which often drove me through a rollercoaster of emotions) but very rewarding in the end – their method really works! Moreover, Lisbon’s Le Wagon team did a great job ensuring there were plenty leisure moments to counter-balance our hard work: we’d all get together for a drink in the evening quite regularly, they’d organise a dinner every Friday and yoga classes twice a week were also included <3

Now that the bootcamp is over, I feel really empowered thanks to my new tech skills. Also, it’s great knowing that I’ll have access for life to Le Wagon’s online platform (featuring tons of really useful tutorials and other learning materials) and to the community of amazing former “Le Wagoners” around the world – both being an invaluable source of knowledge and networking!

I’m really glad I made the decision of joining Le Wagon and definitely recommend the bootcamp to those who feel excited about the challenge of putting their brains to work in order to unlock a universe of endless new opportunities for their professional lives!

Have you ever felt like you have good ideas, but you don’t really know how to make them real?

Let me tell you, I was having this exact same feeling for over one year.  As founders of a no-web start-up, my cofounder and I were feeling that to grow we needed to make our ideas accessible to everybody through web apps.  The option we had to do this was to hire tech guys or an agency to develop our ideas.  The problem was that as a start-up our budget was very restricted, so we were always getting to those typical questions:  What if the “magic” idea we have is not that good? What if the people we hire steal our idea?  What if they take more time than expected?  All these questions took us to the next question: why don’t we become the tech guys by learning to code? That was it!

I started the coding learning process through free online learning platforms.  But after a few months, I realized it was taking me nowhere.  I found two problems -  
The first was that I didn’t know what courses to choose.  What’s the first language I should learn? What should be the next one? How are they supposed to be linked?  
The second problem was that I was solving the challenges on their platform and if I was getting stuck I could just click the solve this exercise button and the platform was solving it for me.

Those two problems where the ones that brought me to applying for Le Wagon Lisbon.  

And let me summarize my experience there in few words: Le Wagon has been the best learning experience I have had in my life so far.  I truly believe it’s a game changer.  Everyday I was attending a two-hour lecture until 11 am.  After that I was solving challenges for five hours base on what I have had just learned, helped by teachers and assistant teachers. And, from 5pm to 7pm, I was discussing with the teaching staff and with my classmates on how I had solved the challenges and what could have been a better way.  The pace was perfect for me and after nine weeks I’m proud of my new knowledge in five different languages and in one framework.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, Le Wagon gives you solid bases to develop functional web apps and test them in the market in agile way and if the market doesn’t validate your idea you still have the knowledge to create another one and validate it again and so on.

If you feel like you have good ideas, my advice for you is that you learn to code.  Is the most effective way to test those ideas.  For me, Le Wagon was the best way to learn how to code, maybe for you is the same.

Great experience these 9 weeks at Le Wagon Lyon.

The teaching materials and monitoring tool are simply enormous.

My objective was to be autonomous in the web project design : to be able to concretize and materialize ideas of projects. And this is largely achieved with the bonus of tons of good practices to be super efficient and do a quality job.

Beyond learning the code, it is also teams of teachers and organization who invest themselves at your side and encourage all alumni and project leaders.

Le Wagon is not only these 9 weeks, it is also and especially a very strong community that accompanies you long after...

My name is George, and I’m a farmer looking to change how we buy our groceries. I work with my mum, on our 52 acre organic farm near Byron Bay, Australia (Check it out on instagram @farm.and.co ). However it wasn’t always as easy and idyllic as it sounds. For a long time, we were selling to wholesale markets, and struggling to make a profit.

Not long ago we changed our business model, and now sell all of our products direct to consumer, at our doorstep. In this model, we see an opportunity for customers to buy direct from the farmer whilst also providing producers with a fair wage.

I want to bring this model to more farmers and food makers. So I decided to go to Le Wagon.

At Le Wagon, I was lucky to meet some amazing people from all around the world. Some of which I am still working on projects with today. Each day we worked on projects and challenges, and 9 weeks later we each know how to code. The bootcamp was amazing, including patient, caring teachers, awesome facilities for all the students and yoga each week as promised.

It’s still hard to believe I can now code. I feel like a magician. Almost anything I want to create, I can. Currently I am perfecting my idea and will be launching on the 12th of May. You can view it at farmandco.com.au

Before joining Le Wagon, I had never had a relationship with computers. Any problem I'd have I'd go running to my boyfriend for help. I had been a teacher before joining and at university I'd studied Art History, nothing related to computers at all. I didn't think I'd have it in me to be good at web development. What was web development?

After meeting lots of self- taught coder digital nomads and hearing some good reviews of Le Wagon I decided it was now or never to try to change my career. Time to try something new, put my brain to work like it never had before and learn how to code. I was lucky that Lisbon had a Le Wagon school and even luckier that I was able to get the resident's scholarship which made it much more affordable.

I did Batch 122 which started in January, in the cold, wet winter months I thought were perfect for hibernating and coding away. And that's what I did, all day, everyday. 

At first the weeks were extremely hard for me, I'd never used my brain like this, I was tired, some days I did not understand how to solve the exercises, I thought I'd never be good enough...There were days I went home sad and frustrated, others however,  when I felt on top of the world excited about the new things I had learnt and what I was able to achieve. Understanding the challenges, working out the code for myself was both elating and inspirational!  As the weeks proceeded I realised that it wasn't sustainable worrying about understanding every single line of code. You have to trust in yourself and even if you have trouble doing so, trust in the system and the course and at some point you will  start to realise that even though things don't get easier, you can solve them as your confidence increases. At some point you think: I can do this! It's a wonderful feeling.

The challenges are never easy, from Day 1 you go through a baptism of fire but with the help of teachers and the other classmates you will feel very proud getting through it all. Le Wagon achieves this in 3 primary and essential ways:

1. The teachers and TA are an absolute dream-team. Extremely knowledgeable,  helpful, supportive with unrelenting patience and the desire to make you understand and more importantly to empower you how to achieve results for yourself. They also have an amazing energy and a great sense of humor making them so much fun to be around - Superteachers!

2. The buddy system - everyday you are set up with a new buddy, this helps immensely because some days you are being helped by a stronger student and other days you find yourself being the stronger one, mentoring your buddy. Then you feel you've really understood. The buddy system allows you to find your strengths and weaknesses and form strong bonds with your classmates.

3. The community and the atmosphere. Le Wagon is a family and you really feel that from Day 1. Our manager and community-manager Shannon and Maria were superb at making us feel at ease and involved at all times. We would have a weekly Friday dinner and many other activities which allowed us to bond with each other and the teachers. Beer pong, dancing, doughnuts and snacks, hugs, you name it, we had it!

Now that my Le Wagon experience has ended I am still very much tied to the community and I would be very sad if that were not so. These are bonds made for life and I know that if I ever have a programming problem I have tens of people I can turn to for help. I am hoping to find a job as a Junior Developer and really achieving my goal of changing my career and my life. 

Extremely highly recommended course and experience and a special shout out to the Lisbon school. The people involved have a big heart and it shows in their teaching, organizing, the ability to motivate people and make it fun!

Among all the bootcamps, I think this is one of the best way to learn about web development. Le wagon Lyon provides high level training with very talented teachers. I highly recommend Le Wagon to anyone looking for a career change or for technical skills to develop a business. It's definitely not easy, but you wont regret it!

One more important thing: Le wagon is a human experience too, you’ll have the opportunity to develop great friendships and networks. All the staff cares about the happiness of the students and are willing to create a supportive environment to help you achieve all the goals of the training.

Among all the bootcamps, I think this is one of the best way to learn about web development. Le wagon Lyon provides high level training with excellent teachers. I highly recommend Le Wagon to anyone looking for a career change or for technical skills to develop a business. It's definitely not easy, but you wont regret it!

One more important thing: Le wagon is a human experience too, you’ll have the opportunity to develop great friendships and networks. All the staff cares about the happiness of the students and are willing to create a supportive environment to help you achieve all the goals of the training.

Thanks again Matthieu, Kevin and Joseph!