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 studied Mathematics at University and after graduating I wasn’t quite sure what career path I wanted to go down. I ended up working as a financial analyst for a government organisation, but before the two year mark I quickly realised this wasn’t where I envisioned my future. What I did know is that I wanted something more mentally challenging that also allowed me to be creative.

During my studies, I remember regretting not making use of the extra curricular classes that taught programming languages and so it remained on my list of skills I wanted to have. I started looking up coding courses that I could do in my free time, however it never really kicked off until a friend of mine recommended Le Wagon. We attended the Demo Day at the Google for Startups Campus in our home city London and were more than impressed. It was then that I started the Ruby Track on CodeCademy and realised just how much I enjoyed it.

I wanted a break from London, as well as better weather so I decided to apply to Le Wagon Bali. There was a part of me that questioned whether I was making the right choice, and if it would be better to do the bootcamp in my home city instead, however I can without a doubt say that I made the best decision to pick Le Wagon in Bali.

All the teachers, Guido, Eli, Prima, Gian-Luca, Rayhan & Sonia were fantastic and were really committed to the academic learning of the students as well as their mental well-being. They went above my expectations and would often stay behind after class to go over concepts or help with issues we were having so readily and happily. I learnt so much from them, but most importantly I re-gained my love for learning and a new found passion for web and application development. I feel confident and excited to now start a career in tech which I find absolutely amazing considering my position just a few months ago. I can honestly say Le Wagon Bali has been one of the best decisions to invest in myself that I have made in a while.

Before Le wagon I was a bit lost, I had just finished playing hockey having to step away because of injury & my mind was starting to go in a lot of different directions. When you spend so much of your time dedicated to one thing, a sudden change can really mess you up mentally & that leads me to explain my experience at Le wagons bootcamp.... It's quite scary being 21 from Canada travelling across the world to learn how to code; something which I knew absolutely nothing about. The first day was intimidating, seeing all these different classmates with prior business, product, and even programming knowledge that I didn't have. A lot of times you want to just give up and quit. I remember week 1 trying to 'iterate through a hash'... and thinking "I'm never going to be able do this I should just throw my laptop out the window", but with the help of the teachers and other classmates everything started to come together & FAST.  Le wagon's bootcamp may not be considered tertiary education in some people's eyes, but they provide you with connections and resources that you could never hope to find on your own. By the time week 9 came I truly felt confident in a lot of different things that I had no clue how to do before and that is all credited to the way the course is structured. For anyone who is a little bit lost in their life but has the desire to consume new knowledge Le wagon is a must. I learned it's not just about the code, there are so many other avenues & tricks that are taught at Le wagon to help you find the perfect setting for you in this rapidly expanding tech industry. For my final project our team worked on MilesX, an app that allows you to buy and sell airline miles for cheaper business class flights.It was a lot of work, there was a ton of web pages to create, and group disagreements we overcame. All in all I think that having to deal with those hiccups along the way made our project better. Any disagreement always spurred new discussions & having 10 pages made everyone work harder on the APIs, the design, and the basic structure. It turned out really well and I'm personally just happy that our group could learn as much as we did in a 2 week period. For anyone thinking about joining Le wagon, do it. If you have a creative attitude I urge you to explore code. I read recently that only 0.5% of the earths population know how to write lines of code; thanks to Le wagon I can now say that I am apart of arguably the most exclusive club in the world! Why wouldn't you want to join that club too.PS.This is of course my own opinion, but learning to code in Bali is unparelleled ;Reece Soukoroff, Batch 306 Bali

I completed the 9-week bootcamp with Le Wagon in Bali, Indonesia in November 2019 (Batch #306). The program teaches Ruby, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, SQL, git, GitHub, Heroku and how to combine everything with the Ruby on Rails framework. Graduates are able to build web applications incl. backend, frontend, and hosting. In addition, the program touches important aspects such as developing in a team, testing, dev ops, and design. In general, the bootcamp curriculum is very well thought out and fully enables graduates to start building.

I’m a 31 years old mechanical engineer and MBA from Germany. In the last five years, I have founded and build a hardware startup in the field of measurement technology for industrial customers. While communicating with our software developers in the role of a product owner, I always felt a communication gap due to my lack of experience in software development. My motivation for the bootcamp was to close this gap and ideally being able to develop a Minimum Viable Product myself for my next startup idea.

The Bootcamp has exceeded my expectations, especially in terms of the breadth and depth of practical skills being taught. Each morning begins with a two-hour lecture followed by challenges for independent study, where you can exchange ideas with a student buddy or get help from a teaching assistant if needed. At the end of the day, there will be a live coding of individual students in front of the whole group. Those who still have the energy after 9-10 hours of programming can recapitulate what they have learned at home with "flashcards" i.e. virtual index cards.

I most liked the methodology and didactic the program follows. Especially the daily challenges are perfectly set up with a gamification approach. Regular successes keep motivation high and the day flies by very quickly. I started a pure online course before and unfortunately had the opposite experience. I can 100% recommend the Le Wagon bootcamp as a full-stack web development in-person program.

The location of Bali is excellent because it makes it possible to relax on weekends in fantastic surroundings. In addition, almost all the students have traveled to Bali for the bootcamp and can concentrate on the program without distractions.

my trip with the Paris wagon.
When I started thinking about participating in The Wagon, many people tried to discourage me by telling me that I can learn all these things online or that the market is already saturated with developers. Some thought I would find the coding boring, even though nothing could have been more boring than my old Job.
I was a physical trainer but I was bored.
I worked in France and England but I was bored.
Then I made the decision to make the car and applied.
What can I say except that it was exceptional.
I'm not disappointed that I did it and my only disappointment is that I didn't do it sooner.
Everything is magnificent from the premises to the people we meet, the evenings with the alumni.

The content of the courses is rich and well explained.
The teachers are patient and know how to get you back on track if you ever let go.
It's intense especially during the first 3 weeks but you have to hold on and not lose hope.
Things integrate into you without you noticing.
I didn't think I would be able to succeed in this adventure, the teachers supported me and motivated me until I unblocked and headed for success with the certificate.
every week you have an after work and different activities which makes you feel like you are part of a big family.
And indeed we are a big family with links all over the world.
If you hesitate any longer, you will miss out on an extraordinary adventure that can change the course of your life.

I had no technical background or experience at all when I decided to join Le Wagon, I have a degree in Literature/Philosophy and had spent 8 years in education recruitment - so quite different! I’d been contemplating making a career change for a while, and did a lot of research into different options before I landed on the idea of a bootcamp course. I applied to a few of the different bootcamps in London but was leaning towards Le Wagon for a number of reasons, two of them being how welcoming and friendly Alex was when I had my interview at their (really cool) London campus, and secdonly how active and connected their alumni network is. I wanted to be part of something that doesn’t suddenly end when you finish the course, but is about giving and receiving support for the long term. I was accepted onto the course that started in July 2019, and the course itself was a complete whirlwind of great fun with awesome people. The days were intense and I dreamt about code pretty much every night, but they have perfected the balance between hard work with social activities and really nice touches, like cake every time it’s someone’s birthday (which was a lot), yoga, pizza lunches and other social events to help everyone let off steam. The curriculum builds day by day in such a way that feels so natural - you don’t realise how much you’re learning until you’re suddenly building entire web apps! I absolutely recommend Le Wagon to anyone who wants to learn to code without hesitation.

Lawyer until June 2018, I did batch #250 at Le Wagon Paris between April and June 2019. Before Le Wagon, I created my training organization in October 2018. Since a very young age, I was interested in computers. Fascinated by coding, learn it was the next logical step.

Because of my schedule and after looking a few different schools, there was one in particular that caught my eye. It was Le Wagon ! Why ? They teach you « coding » in only 2 months, and they make it very easy for you to reach your goal right after (find a job, start your own business...).

I've never learn so much in a short period of time !

The most amazing thing that I truly value during my time at Le Wagon was meeting so many like-minded people. Not just meeting our teachers and cohort, learning in a co-working space got me a chance to meet different entrepreneurs, developers, designers... It helps me to stay motivated and inspired throughout my coding journey. The teachers and teaching assistants are always there to support you and you will be learning a lot really fast.

And you know what ? I’m now, in turn, a teaching assistant at Le Wagon Paris.

A big thank you to Le Wagon Paris and their staff for making this whole bootcamp a life changing experience.

If you are wondering whether you should do it or not. Just stop wondering and go for it, you will never regret it.

Having been into tech for some time, I joined Le Wagon in Bali between graduating from uni in London and starting my job in ecommerce at Amazon a few months later. My goal was to acquire the skills necessary to evolve within more technical roles within the tech industry or be able to put together a product quickly if I ever wanted to start a business.

Le Wagon promises to bring technical skills to creative people and delivers on that promise splendidly.

As you start the bootcamp having seen some of the products presented on demo day, you think ‘There’s no way I’ll be able to do something like this’ but as the weeks pass by your ability to build grows exponentially and everything starts coming together. LW provides all the skills you need to put together a well-functioning, well-designed app. I was lucky to be able to build my product idea in a team of 3 and the end result exceeded in every way the expectations that I had for an MVP.

First you learn about the inner workings of Ruby, Object Oriented Programming and the MVC pattern, that will let you build the back end of your project. You then learn the UI/UX side of things with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Finally you learn to make everything come together with a developing framework (Ruby on Rails) and get plenty of opportunities to practice by building two web apps.

About Bali:
I literally cannot think of a reason why someone would choose to do Le Wagon anywhere else than Bali. It will cost you less to fly in and out of you country and live in a villa near the beach and live comfortably than rent a room and live day-to-day in a big city.

I also cannot think of a better learning environment than Bali. Let me illustrate my point with a description of perfect day at LW Bali:

6:30am: Wake up and drive down to the beach on my scooter for a surf lesson
8am: Come back home, jump in the pool, shower and head to Le Wagon. The classroom is on the rooftop of a hotel with sea view. Get an omelette for ~£1 from the hotel’s kitchen, get ready for the day.
9am: Go over today’s new concepts in the  1h/1h30 lecture, settle with my buddy for the day on the bean bags on the terrace and start work on today’s exercises.
12:30am: Lunch break. Go with some classmates to one of Canggu’s restaurants (they’re all super close), eat a filling and healthy lunch for a fraction of what it would cost me in London. Head back to LW.
1:30pm: Solve more problems, they usually get more and more challenging as you get through them. Raise a few tickets if I get stuck on some exercises.
Around 5pm: Live code time, a teacher presents us with a problem that we have to solve in teams right there, and then we go through the solution all together.
6pm/6:30pm: Head to a bar/restaurant on the beach with some classmates, share a beer and a dinner, watch the sunset.
8:30pm: Go home and go over today’s flashcards to internalise today’s new concepts. Sleep early to feel energised for the next day!

All in all, the quality of living is so good that you can focus truly on getting as much as you can from the program. The vibe is relaxed enough that you don’t feel FOMO from working a lot but dynamic enough that there’s always somewhere exciting to go on the weekend.

About the people: The core team is amazing and makes sure that everything works out fine. When I had a last minute passport issue, they worked with me and found a last minute solution that solved the issue. They’re people you can talk to seriously if there’s an issue but that you can also have fun with on the weekend.

As for the students, the people that do LW in Bali are often ppl that travel to Bali specifically for the bootcamp. As such, the classroom becomes your main source of socialising and you develop a tight community feeling. There are more people that are professional and come here to transit to something new than say, college graduates. The Bali effect means that age barriers don’t really apply there, I was the youngest of the batch and never once felt that was an issue. Everyone comes with their own background and everyone leaves Bali with an international network just from that classroom.

Wrapping up:

I left LW feeling more empowered than after 3 years of university, and probably learned what would have taken me at least 2/3 years to learn by myself in my free time. Also taught me how to learn, after the bootcamp I was able to build my own personal project from scratch with only the help of Internet when I got stuck (and a few posts in LW’s Slack ‘Help’ channel :))

I know some other bootcamps are way more job oriented and will spend time on acing developer interviews, or will train you super hard in one language so that you can get a job as a developer in that specific field. If that’s your ambition, those bootcamps might be a good option for you. Who LW is for: the budding entrepreneur, the creative, the guy who wants to become a product manager. LW focuses on letting you build stuff.

I decided to go to this boot camp when my current company told me they wanted me to join the dev team. I had an incredible experience and am excited to eventually go back and maybe even help TA someday. You will learn so much about dev (obviously) but also patience and teamwork. 

It's been three months since I finished Le Wagon's Bootcamp and I'm pretty happy how things have gone so far.

Well, prior to Le Wagon, I had been working as Product Manager in Rio de Janeiro but I've never had the chance to really dive deep into technology, which has been my goal since I figured it out this was the market that I'd like to work on. As a PM, it is really important to evaluate the customers' needs, to know how to deal with the different stakeholders and, of course, understand what has to be done to solve the customers pains. However, in the startup environment, things happen really fast and your pace must be equivalent, in order to deliver value to the customers and its investors. Thus, I felt that I had a technology knowledge gap which was holding me down to take higher flights.

As soon as I felt that I needed to take this step deeper into technology, I found about Le Wagon and, since from reading its syllabus, I felt that it would be a great opportunity to learn and evolve as someone who wants with technology for life.

I took part of the #261 batch and it was a great opportunity to meet new people, exchange experiences and, of course, learn a lot of new things. The bootcamp is really hands on, with a lot of practical exercises and with a dynamic really similar to what is working as a developer in the real world. The student really needs to look for the answer, debug its code and learn from its mistakes. Also, what impressed me was the product driven mentality from it, which lacks in a lot of companies and is a huge differential among other developers.

After struggled a lot, I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. At the moment, I work at Stone Pagamentos, the most valuable payment company in Brazil, as a developer and I'm sure that the Le Wagon took a huge part on it.

I’ve always been a nerd but I’ve never had the patience to sit down and code, let alone where to start. I remember the first weeks of the course, having done the prep work I thought we would be eased into the world of coding with a few theory-based lessons. Instead, I found myself learning how to use the terminal on the first day, and I’m pretty sure my first line of code was written on the second. Thank code it was practical, I’m the type to switch off if I’m not engaged by what I am doing. Each week we would complete a set of challenges. Each week it would get more complex there would be moments where I was pulling my hair out, however, the teaching staff were always on hand to help breakdown the problem and help me reach that eureka moment. The part-time course was challenging and it’s not for the faint-hearted. You are about to embark on a journey of trials and tribulations for 6 months. But my, it is worth it in the end. I’m far more competent than I ever imagined. My reason for doing the course was, having some entrepreneurial spirit I’m always hatching an idea. Whereas in the past, I may have cobbled together a landing page, using some HTML template and a series of trials and errors. Now I’m capable of building a web application and this is what I plan to do with my newly found free time. Well, at least some of it. This course is for entrepreneurs and wannabe developers alike. I would also say anyone working in the tech sector would benefit from this course. I myself work for an app and this course has enabled me to understand conversations that in the past would have gone right over my head. Viva Le Wagon!

I dabbled in coding when I was in high school but never thought to pursue a career in it. I have a bachelor's degree in business economics and after spending over 4 years as an ophthalmic technician I decided I wanted to do something different. 

The Bootcamp was definitely a challenge for me, and I struggled initially in a good way. I think the structure of the Bootcamp and learning method worked for me. Short and intense lectures every morning and then the rest of the day to work on what we learned that morning. It's really an incredible learning curve and it was amazing to see how quickly i progressed. The resources that Le Wagon provides are outstanding. The learning platform we used, Kitt, is great because all the lesson material is in one place and we can always refer or check the lecture slides and knowledge base because we have lifetime access to it! 

I worked on Lavender, a platform for social investment as my final project. I especially enjoyed JavaScript - one of the many programming languages we learned in the Bootcamp. It makes dynamic websites and I was able to code the features in the final app we presented at the end of the Bootcamp. I enjoy every part of the development process but my favorite is working on the front end because of its creative potential, because I can see the results immediately. So I think for anyone interested in coding, I really recommend Le Wagon because you get to explore different languages and eventually you'll see what works for you and maybe you even discover what you want to do with these new skills. 

Doing the Bootcamp in Bali was a great decision. Le Wagon has locations all over the world but I felt that coming from Los Angeles, it would be a similar environment. The weather is great and I don't think there's any place I'd rather learn to code in. You have this great view from the classroom and it's all positive vibes. Spending 2 months in Bali really makes a huge difference.

Before I started the Bootcamp, the goal was to learn how to code and produce creative products and solve problems. I was able to accomplish all of that after 9 weeks, that's pretty crazy. I definitely had to work hard throughout the program but it was worth it. Le Wagon has helped me start the journey to pursue my interest in building scalable, innovative products that can make a positive difference in its users' lives.

Great experience at Le Wagon. I made the decision to attend the Bootcamp in hopes of becoming a digital nomad. It was a great experience and taught me what it's going to take to make my dreams come true. I would recommend this Bootcamp to anyone looking to get into the tech industry or just learn a new skill.

Graduated from a business school, having worked in finance, marketing and business development in the Real Estate Industry and Banks, I was seeking to develop my entrepreneurship skills.

I always was excited intellectually about coding, starting like many financial persons on excel and going through VBA to automatize many processes of the working place I used to work into, improving the fluidity of the operational part, diminishing repetitive actions and minimizing human risks.

Deeping myself into the code, was for me a necessity, mainly because I always want to learn about everything, but moreover be able to understand, communicate and exchange in my future jobs (that will for sure be in the tech industry) with either technical or business persons.

What is the most surprising in this experience, is that you came to learn code, thinking that you will spend hours on your computer, and going back home exhausted. Well, most of the days you will...

But some other days, starting paying attention to your environment, you will meet incredible people, with outstanding background: from the person being a monk over the past 10 year looking to change his life for good, to the marketing / HR persons looking for to have shift in his career passing through the professional tennisman and brilliant entrepreneur passionate about investment.

Having such diversity is what makes this Bootcamp something bigger than just a learning experience. Maybe not everybody leaves from here, having new best friends, but for sure you are now a part of a new family. It's just up to you to dive yourself into it.

So, what I'm doing now ?

• Having a focus on the product I dedicate my recent days to work with my CTO in my start-up on the UX / UI (being more interested in the front aspect) conceiving and achieving our product.
• At the same time, I'm on my way to pass jobs interview to join two persons of my project team (grizbi) that has been hired in the same place, a consultancy firm dedicated on digital transformation integrating technical aspect in his reflexion and having a environment similar to the one that you can find in le Wagon.
• And finally but not the least, as I always wanted to involve myself in education, I had the opportunity to join Le Wagon's team as Teacher Assistant in order to help and follow the new student in their comprehension.

That's it for me, the rest you will have to discover it by yourself, but first come to the Demo Day to just have a hint of what can be a signifcant change in your life !

Good luck on your learning path ! 

Before starting Le Wagon, I was working as a Senior Consultant for a consulting firm specialized in tech. I was contributing to many projects. Mainly UX/UI, CRM and Marketing projects. But I wasn't fully satisfied because I wanted to learn precisely how things work. For example in design, you can be a good designer who knows how to use design tools (such as Sketch and Figma). But to become a great designer, you need some serious coding skills. It's really important to be able to differentiate what can be done, how long it will take, what are your constraints due to the tech stack, and so on. So I came to Le Wagon in order to develop that kind of skills and work on interesting projects.

I was really (and positively) surprised when I arrived, because above everything else, Le Wagon is a strong community of like-minded people. During the bootcamp, you meet a lot of interesting people who have various backgrounds, and different ways of thinking. This is extremely valuable because you will always work at some point with someone who found the solution to an exercise, but in a complete different way than yours. And this is where it gets really interesting if you are curious, because you will start to study different way of approaching the same problem. And then you will probably come up with several solutions, while being able to assess the pros and cons for each solutions.

This is just a small example of why Le Wagon is unique. Teachers are fascinating, very accessible, nice and competent. The staff is very active, and helpful when you need them. Like I said, this a community that lives with strong values, and also digitally with a myriad of Slack channels where alumnis continuously share helpful information, job posts, resources, tips...

Frankly, before starting Le Wagon I had fear that I wouldn't find what I was expecting with a bootcamp. But as soon as I started, I felt great and always pushed to learn more. And this was before the life-changing experience of the final projects where you work as a team. This is probably the best moments at Le Wagon, when you realize that, YES YOU CAN DO IT! You can design and develop great websites. And you are not alone to do it!

I found exactly what I expected, because Le Wagon gave me the opportunity to improve my coding skills, and now I feel much more confident as a Product Designer as I ever was before, because I have a better understanding of the articulation between design and code. I am able to design and develop my own UI components, and think more broadly about the UX, and how everything will work from a back-end standpoint. So yeah... Le Wagon is great, and if you are a curious and motivated person, I think you should definitely do it!

Who’s going in London for an APM (Associate Product Manager) program? I am!! Am I excited? Yes! Is it thanks to Le Wagon? Definitely!

I taught myself a bit about Product Management in my previous job as a project manager, discovered I loved it and wanted to dive deeper in this career. On job offers, I found out most companies were looking for technical skills and I had a business background. I found trainings, conferences, books, but I wanted expert ‘official’ knowledge that would be recognized as valuable by recruiters. I thought about keeping learning all on my own, but it takes a long time to look online for the best resources and practicing and learning after work on the evening and weekends is not so easy.

Le Wagon is a coding school that provides a solid framework on how tech products are developed: you learn how to code, how developers work (methods, mindset), you learn about user stories, user flows, product design sprint, design tools, UX… Lots of skills that can clearly give you bonus points when applying. Teachers are experts in their field and there is a real culture of excellency: students are very motivated and aim for the best, you work A LOT and you have a lifetime access to online resources that are very very very well-made. I loved that during these 9 weeks (and still after!), everyone was focused on gaining the most out of Le Wagon experience.

About Le Wagon community: it is clearly one of this training’s biggest asset. People are kind, helpful and always happy to share. I found a job thanks to a Le Wagon alumni through our internal Slack just a few weeks after having finished the bootcamp. I’m gonna be a Product Manager on a SaaS and guess what? They used to only hire engineers. But now I do have some technical skills, so I had my chance as well :)

I have always wanted to learn code because i thought that Coding was becoming really important for young people who want to become entrepreneur. I decided to sacrifice my summer and immerse myself in the world of code.

Guess what? It was not a sacrifice at all! I discovered that I love coding.

Le Wagon has been by far the most intensive and efficient training I ever followed.

The methodology, the staff and people were amazing!

After 9 weeks at Le Wagon, I was able to make a web app by myself and had enough confidence to keep on learning.

The Wagon is not just a simple coding bootcamp, it is above all an incredible human adventure, which makes it possible to desacralize the world of coding, and to better understand the technological challenges of companies.
The Wagon taught me to better understand the challenges of web development, and to think like a Product Manager.

I am a Product Specialist in a big ad tech company, but my background is in business. Taking Le Wagon bootcamp was the best decision I took in 2019, and probably one of the best decisions I took for my career in a while. Let me tell you why.
My role is to help customers make the best of our advertising solutions. Sometimes it can involve some technical discussions with developers, data scientists or even internally with product managers. Before attending the bootcamp, I was feeling limited in the kind of support I could provide to my clients, or in the type of conversations I could lead.
On a more personal level, I was feeling that my learning curve was slowing down. Working in sales, I was also under the impression that I was not necessarily in the right organisation for the type of skills or personality I have; and that it would be harder for me to  stand out and thrive.
Now, taking the bootcamp did not magically solve all these issues. Some are  longer-term questions I need to tackle. But first, I definitely feel savvier at my job. With this new expertise, I can take on more technical projects and look for opportunities to collaborate with tech  teams to extend the scope of my current role.  But the best effect of the training was a bit more subtle yet more dramatic. Taking this step back and proving myself I could learn new skills  made me gain an incredible amount of self-confidence.
Let me just conclude by talking shortly of the program itself. I loved the fact that is was very practical. Little theory, many exercises in pairs with the help of super-friendly Teacher Assistants.
To sum-up, I can only recommend!

Deciding to attend Le Wagon is turning out to be one of the most pivotal moments of my life more and more by the day.  Before Le Wagon, I was on a path that I didn’t truly want to be on.  I always had creative ideas, but did not realize how important this would be with regards to my career choice.  I realized as I got older that I wanted to try and make a start-up, but it felt like it was too late for me as I had never studied computer science or written a line of code until fairly recently.  The problem was that I was playing it safe by having decided to go to medical school due to a fear of trying to do what I really wanted to do.  It was a very risky route to commit to, and the security of being a doctor sounded more appealing on paper, for a while at least.  I always would procrastinate and tell myself that I would really follow my passions later, endlessly pushing the entrepreneurial can down the road and while making excuses.  Going further into the medical school route, I began to feel a deep sense regret that I was not doing what I really wanted to do.  I worried that if I were to make it to my deathbed not having tried my true calling, I would regret it more than anything else that could possibly happen in my life.  To keep a very long story short, it was not working out, so I left medical school and eventually ended up at Le Wagon Bali. 

Beforehand, while I was determining which coding program to attend, I researched my options pretty heavily as picking the wrong program could build a broken foundation and set you on a terrible programming trajectory compared to picking the proper one.  Le Wagon appealed to me for several reasons above all of the others.   Compared to the closest equivalent American programs, it was much more affordable for a nearly identical curriculum.  Just as important though, it was the only course I found that maintained an entrepreneurially inspired, product-based framed approach in its curriculum.  With an end goal of wanting to build a startup above all else, this appealed to me above nearly all else.  These factors along with the unanimously amazing reviews, diverse classroom locations, and the seemingly awesome culture fostered by the program were why I decided to eventually apply and enroll.

Let’s be completely honest here, the program is incredibly intense.  It feels as though it moves at nearly light speed to the point where it feels like trying to drink all of the water coming from a fire hydrant.  I prepared myself for the program ahead of time far more than was recommended, and I still found myself struggling often.  There were days that by the time I would get home, I felt completely dejected and would have no confidence in my ability to even complete the program and learn what was required to make a start-up by myself.  I even doubted that the program was legit in its claims at times.  However, throughout the course, they always would tell us to trust them and their process, so my batch and I all did that to help cope with our suffering more effectively.  Keeping the end goal of the reason I left medical school and came to Le Wagon in mind, to make my own start-up ideas get brought to life rather than just dreaming about doing so for the rest of my life, and with the help of the amazing staff and classmates, I persevered until the end when I finally really understood the big picture.  During many parts of the program, it’s admittedly incredibly hard to see the forest amongst the trees.  We spend weeks learning concepts as they stand alone, but it doesn’t all come together in a big picture sort of way until the end when the Rails framework is introduced to us to bring everything that we learn together to create real life apps.  Everything taught to us during the class that is included in the curriculum is there to be taught to us for a reason.  The structure of the program is all very well thought out to teach us what we need to know in the most effective and practical manner.   

It’s important to note again that due to how intense and fast-paced the program is, much of the real learning is achieved during the final weeks of the program.  It’s much more effective to learn these concepts in a practical real-world way by bringing them to work together via developing an actual working product from scratch than it is to learn about them in a stand-alone manner.  They all interact together, which is what makes the product-based approach to Le Wagon so amazing.  Overall, I’m very happy that I decided to join Le Wagon.  The culture that Le Wagon has built is an amazing and inspiring one to be a part of through the suffering and long-days we experienced.  The teachers are really the best.  They are so patient, helpful, and kind.  Many have gone through Le Wagon at some point themselves, so they truly do understand what we are going through.  The resources provided to us as students and alumni are both life-saving and game-changing.  The learning never really ends when it comes to the software universe, and Le Wagon really does an amazing job at providing a solid foundation with which to build upon for the various futures that its alumni wish to create for themselves.  I’m working on bringing an MVP version of my own start-up to life right now as I write this, all thanks to Le Wagon.  I was never able to learn these ideas by myself when I tried to teach everything to myself alone, and I am eternally grateful that Le Wagon was able to help me learn how to do this all.  I feel that Rails is by far the best framework to learn in order to develop a way to bring your own start-up ideas to life quickly and effectively. Ruby is a very beginner friendly programming language to learn as well when starting off too.   I’m grateful that I had a chance to attend Le Wagon, and I would highly recommend it to everyone who is considering enrolling. 

Le Wagon a été pour pour moi une expérience incroyable intellectuellement. En effet, j’y ai appris beaucoup et découvert un domaine qui m’intéressait depuis toujours.  Aujourd’hui grâce au Wagon j’ai les outils pour travailler et évoluer dans le domaine de la tech. Je ne peux que hautement recommander cette formation pour tout futur développeur web ou curieux du web ou de la tech de manière générale.

I really enjoyed my 9 weeks at Le Wagon. I feel like I have learned a lot, I now understand much better the logic behind web development, plus I have been given all the tools and resources to be a working independent developer. There is a good vibe in the bootcamp and the teachers and TA are very competent. At the end of the course you also get tips on how to prepare for tech interviews and they organize workshop in which you can directly meet with hiring companies/startups and Job Agencies.