Le Wagon

I started to work in the Tech industry after graduating from Business School in 2014. I was lucky enough to work in different teams, on various cool projects. But as time was passing by, I was getting more and more frustrated: although I thought I was getting the big picture, I had absolutely no understanding of the technical aspects of the products I was selling.

About a year ago, a friend was telling me about the Wagon and how it completely changed his way of approaching things and tackling challenges. That’s when it hit me: I realised I was never going to be fulfilled evolving in a sector that was so impenetrable to me. 
I decided to quit my job and join the adventure, although I was a kind of dreading going back to school… 

This was hands down the best decision I ever made. I met an amazing crowd of students, teachers and alumni. The program is dense, but well thought through, to such an extent that it kept on board 44 students with completely different levels of studies, knowledge or experiences. 
I never though you could pack so much in 9 weeks, and how rewarding it could be to finally understand the logic behind concepts that I had been exposed to for over 4 years.

I’m now in the process of starting up my own software company, and I clearly wouldn’t have been able to do it without the bootcamp. It has given me the ability to be independent on so many aspects, and I truly believe it is a life changer to anyone questioning their future. Go for it, you won't regret it!

How simply describe this adventure. I joined Le Wagon for a very particular reason, learn to code in order to be able to code my own project. So, I was in the small club of the aspiring entrepreneurs, a minority in Le Wagon Students. Being from Finance (not the mathematical finance), I wasn’t very familiar with web development, and I haven’t good memories about learn to code at university. I was member of the « Nooo, code is just not for me ! » team. But Frankly, my 2 months experience with Le Wagon reconciled me with coding.
First, the program helps you to build a coding knowledge from scratch, which was a very important point for me. Beyond knowing about HTML or CSS, building basic program with Ruby gave me the necessary background, and the desire to learn more. The firsts « Oh, that works! » were really important for me to break down the psychological barriers about coding. Thereafter, it became a game. Each day, we had new challenges. And each day, we felt stronger that the previous day. The last two weeks with the final Projects were the most exiting. It was at this point that everything we learned before swung into action. To conclude, I would just said that doing Le Wagon was a great experience. I liked the pace (morning courses then all day long to succeed the challenges), the Le Wagon crew (a large and available team of caring teachers), and the atmosphere (in and outside the classroom). OK, I’m not for sure now the best of the web developers, but I now know that coding is actually not that complicated, and that's what makes all the difference.

They have a solid teaching team ranging from teachers who are perfect for beginners to very experienced and knowledgeable engineers. It's also very different from how they teach computer science in college that everything you learn here, you can actually start to use them immediately, i.e. start building your own project or working as a junior developer. They update and adjust their curriculum according to market demand. The bootcamp walks you through the whole process starting from an idea, planning how to implement, what technology to use, backend functionallitie coding, frontend views polishing, all the way to product deployment. You will also practice your public speaking abilities and team working skills. Overall it was one of the best learning experiences I've ever had, and it was definitely the most interactive learning program for me. Highly recommanded.

Having studied Politics at University and spending almost two years working in Fashion, although I could speak of my communication and organisation skills, I often regretted not having any ‘hard skills’ in the working world. What is more, I didn’t feel particularly fulfilled or mentally challenged in my day-to-day work. When I started applying for new jobs, it became clear to me that to break out of the industry my CV now anchored me to, I would have to finally step up to the challenge of developing one of these ‘hard skills’ I secretly wish I had. I had heard of friends learning to code and loving it, although I didn’t think I was good enough at maths or clever enough to try it myself. I decided to play around on Codecademy and actually found myself having fun, and so I decided to apply to Le Wagon. It is safe to say, I have absolutely no regrets! In 9 weeks, I have been able to learn so much and enjoyed every minute of it (even the struggles!) Other alumnis had warned it would be intense, which it is, but it’s such a great learning environment and I never felt too discouraged to keep pushing myself. Le Wagon has now got me hooked, and now that the bootcamp is over, I want to continue learning to code and hope to find work in tech as either a dev or product owner!

I finished my end-of-course internship in cosmetics as a product development manager few months ago.  I studied Digital Marketing and was willing to deal with a product with technical aspects. To do so, it was essential for me to be able to talk with developers, using the right vocabulary, and really understand what was going on. A friend of mine who did Le Wagon talked to me about this 9 weeks of coding bootcamp. It was neither too long, nor too short. Perfect.

That’s how I was part of Le Wagon Paris batch #220, one of the best experience of my life. From the very start, you feel that you are going to embark on an exciting adventure. Let’s be honest, you’ll learn how to code the hard way, sometimes you’ll dream of code, but it works. Not a day I was reticent to go there, all the students, teachers and staff members become your second family in a way, so you’ll never feel lonely and always supported.

Of course I’ve gained technical skills. Even a week after the end of the bootcamp I am still amazed by the fact that we’ve coded a functional and really well designed app from scratch with my team.

Humanly speaking, I already said that earlier but I insist, getting a foothold at Le Wagon is being part of a huge community all around the world, always glad to help you.

What’s next then? As I want to work on a technical product, Product Owner is the perfect job for me. With the skills acquired thanks to Le Wagon, I am sure it will be easier for me to apply to this kind of job than before I’ve joined the bootcamp.

After two years working in the banking industry in London, I decided to change life and go back to France to become an entrepreneur.  Leaving behind me a confortable professional situation, my friends, my girlfriend, my flat… and went back to my parent’s place to start a new life.

The first struggle on my entrepreneurial journey was the lack of coding skills. I had many business/product ideas but found myself unable to create a MVP without hiring a freelance developer to build the app/website. I realised that I didn’t want to fall in a dependency relationship towards a developer. Hence, joining a coding bootcamp became obvious – it brought me to the FullStack Programme at Le Wagon.

Le Wagon is definitely a life-changer programme: after 2 intense months of coding, I now can develop a MVP and test multiple business ideas on my own.

Le Wagon is simply amazing because: teachers are exceptional both technically and personally, the atmosphere is unique, students have very diverse backgrounds and the program is perfectly structured. If you are in a similar mindset, please do not hesitate anymore, join Le Wagon community to have fun and learn!

I worked 2 years for Saas start-up in Healthcare industry as a Customer Onboarding Manager: I knew everything about the product and worked closely with the PO and the Tech team to improve it on a daily basis.

But after the merger with our competitor, we grew so much that every team was working in silo and I lost all connection with the product development.

I then realized it was my favorite part of the job: reflect on, improve, test and design the product.

So I enrolled for Le Wagon Bootcamp to become a Product Owner, and finally be officially shaping the product.

But halfway through the training and as the end was approching, I had my second epiphany: I didn't want to stop learning and coding!

With Le Wagon not only I learned basic coding skills but also discovered the developper mindset:

• curiosity is your prerequisite,
• failing means trying means improving,
• The one asking may be the one sharing and vice-versa

The teaching method was far more well thought out and effective than in my business school, that is why I feel so confident what will happen next!

I finished batch 205 in Lisbon, and I was blown away by the quality of the teaching, and the effort put into ensuring that the 10 week bootcamp gave students the best possible learning experience. The staff were extremely dedicated and always had the time and patience to help with any problems we encountered.

The way that the course is taught is great - with everything being taught from a fundamental basis in order to offer a good grounding in the concepts, and then showing quicker, easier ways to do this without coding it from scratch so that you learn how to build complex web applications in a relatively short amount of time using best practices.

The bootcamp teaches the ruby on rails stack, but all the concepts are completely transferrable, and having done the course I now feel that I would be able to pick up new programming languages and develop using different frameworks relatively easily.

A shift in my first job contract gave me three months to spare. It was then when a friend told me about Le Wagon and highly recommended to take it, I remember he literally said "It will change your life". I had a technical background, but not being capable of implementing anything was frustrating. I did not think it twice and I started my journey at Le Wagon.

Looking back, Le Wagon was an intense experience, but really pleasant to carry. During the week, from 9 to 19ish, fantastic people from all the world with different backgrounds made time fly, and once coding was over, football and beers took place. At weekends, Barcelona's weather and lifestyle offered plenty of possibilities: going to the beach and playing volley ball, tasting local food or, the favourite of some of us, enjoying Barcelona's nightlife.

Le Wagon was just the beginning on my coding journey. As soon as I finished the bootcamp, together with two friends, we founded a start-up. There are still loads of things to learn, but Le Wagon set the essential foundations to keep learning in a fast and solid way.

Now it is me who highly recommend Le Wagon to all my lifelong friends and say "It will change your life".

I was working as a Product Manager at a tech startup in Paris before I joined Le Wagon. I went to their Bali location as I was looking for a change of scenery to consider the next chapter of my professional career as well as to deepen my technical knowledge and expertise to be able to lead technical projects with a more hands-on approach.
The bootcamp has exceeded my expectations on all fronts. Not only did I get comprehensive experience on all full-stack development notions and beyond (databases, test-driven development, API integrations and build, background jobs, mailers, javascript plugins…), the very product-driven approach offered by Le Wagon really has every student consider and experience first-hand how to develop products with a good UX/UI and market fit. The friendships and the network developed hold no comparison, and the surfing, yoga, scenery and multiple events organised by Le Wagon were awesome bonuses.
For a couple of months, we’ve all felt a renewed sense of confidence, creativity and energy. It was a really life-changing experience, far from what one could expect from a simple bootcamp, and one of the best decisions/investments I’ve made in my life.

Since I was a child, I’ve always had lots of business ideas related with internet, but I’ve never found the right moment to develop them, and one of the main reasons was my unknowledge of web development.

Last year, I decided to make a break on my professional career on business consulting to learn new things and decide what had to be my next professional movement. At that moment, I had a business idea, so I decided to learn to code and develop the web-app by myself.

I chose Le Wagon because its academic program was not just learning to code, it was much more than that, it was learning to develop your own web-app, through methodologies like Lean StartUp, UserExperience, Agile and Scrum, Prototyping, etc. I realized that the Coding Bootcamp of Le Wagon was the best program to make real any business idea that you could had.

Then, the experience was amazing. Nine weeks working really hard, learning lots of programming languages, and the best part of the bootcamp, making our web app in teams, designing the solution and coding an entire web app in just two weeks. And outside classes, all the activities that we did with classmates: football and tennis matches, parties, trips, concerts, etc.

I’m very happy to have chosen Le Wagon due to all the people that I met and for everything I learned, I’ll never forget this amazing experience.