Le Wagon

I have always been interested in technology, but with a background in design I thought that maybe it wasn't for me, however after completing the 9 week bootcamp wit Le Wagon I was proven wrong. It was an incredible, eye opening, challenging and rewarding experience. I realised that there is so much opportunity to be creative in coding and to create a working fully functioning app from scratch was amazing. The bootcamp also teaches to you to think in a different way, and pushes you beyond your comfort zone, but truly teaches you how to learn and keep learning. The teachers, the staff and the whole experience was beyond what I imagined.

 

I started my studies in advertising and graphic design in 2009, doing many courses outside my University to expand my skills in different areas that I consider, at the time, useful for my job and profesional development. Through the years, I start to realize that technology was becoming, really fast, a way of consuming products or services, in EVERY single area and industry. No matter what you need, there is  an app or a web to solve your problem; and if it doesn't exist: YOU HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, so DEVELOP IT!
Through my years working as a graphic designer freelance, clients were always asking for basic things that nowadays, every company needs: newsletters and a web - just to start. And my first problem was that I wasn't able to take my design into the web. I think and create the sketches from the design perspective, but I was depending on developers to actually code the design and in many occasions, I would found out, that my ideas were really difficult to develop. Not to mention, that I have to depend on their schedule and budget.
When I asume the world is spinning around tech development, I decided to enrole in Le Wagon Bootcamp in Buenos Aires. Even though I had a lot of expectations, they were by far exceeded in the most positive way! I had the opportunity to practice my english, to know a lot of people around the world and know different cultures. It was surprisingly easy to overcome the intensity of two months, of non stop learning and coding, with the excellent group of people who shared this amazing experience with me! The teachers were super patient and positive, especially in the last two weeks where we struggle the time pressure to solve development issues... They were extraordinary good leaders that trust in our skills and were always there for us!
Le Wagon community is really amazing and supportive! :)

I learned how to code in Le Wagon: after 9 weeks of hard work, I’m capable to start a web application from scratch and I never learned so much in so little time. But what really amazes me is how I was able to do it: I learned through teamwork -- not only by attending classes and completing daily challenges but doing so with help from and helping people with different skills and background. I thought I’d be developing mostly hard skills, but I added soft skills to my abilities and now I feel ready to lead and teach.

Thanks to the people I met in Amsterdam, I’m currently TAing in Le Wagon Sao Paulo and preparing to be a teacher assistant in Rio de Janeiro, thrilled by seeing other students’ projects and helping them to make beautiful products. Le Wagon gives not only the tools to be a fullstack developer, they also teach how to spread this knowledge creating a great community that executes ideas all around the world -- and I couldn’t be more proud of being a part of it. 

As young graduate from a french business school and after several experiences within financial fields, I felt a strong attraction towards the digital world and entrepreneurship. However, I realized that I would not go far without any basic knowledge in coding and digital skills.

After great 9 very (very!) intensive weeks of learning how to code with Le Wagon in Lisbon, I gained much more than what I expected! Before this experience, I had no clue about anything in the coding area...

From a practical point of view, I am amazingly surprised by the level of understanding I have reached over such a short time, not only about pure coding, but also about the overall coding environment, from UX to web hosting. Le Wagon‘s program is very well built with a gradual rise in difficulty and a strong follow-up from the teaching team, that will fit to everybody, no matter their level.

Attending this coding bootcamp was also a great opportunity for me to meet and work with very interesting and smart people coming from different areas and making the whole experience even more rewarding.

I can only recommend this training and can assure you that you will get more than what you expect :)

During and after my graduation I worked at financial related jobs. Because it was not my piece of cake I decided to go abroad to get some experience and study English. And just one year ago I discovered the world of coding. 

I made a lot of research, read a lot of reviews. First of all, I wanted some affordable coding bootcamp in Europe. Second, Le Wagon offers to build something real as the final project. So, it seemed to me as the best choice. And do not forget the wonderful weather, nice beaches and amazing food in Barcelona.

I still can't believe it's over. Even though it was pretty fast track, I thought it would be even worse - more difficult or impossible to understand. I will miss it. Coding is awesome. Now it is time to do so as alumni :) - continuing work on our final project Eatamina and deepen my knowledge. I believe coding open you new word with so many opportunities. 

ALL YOU NEED IS CODE. Thank you guys!

I joined Le Wagon's Batch 6 in Paris (January – March 2015) and since then, I have been building a web agency while becoming a teacher at Le wagon on the side.

Why Le Wagon?

I see 3 main reasons why I joined Le Wagon's FullStack program at first:

1)    Trying online tutorials, I always had the same outcome: "How to switch from theory to practice?"

2)    I found it very hard to launch a web-based business without coding skills or without the ability to understand developers

3)    I wanted to test my ideas from scratch without loosing my mind in the World Wide Web of Ideas (this is something many non-technical profiles do when thinking of a business and it often leads to frustration and to giving up).

That seemed to fit Le Wagon's mission. After meeting the core team, I decided to join the program.

The Full-stack Program

This is a 9-week intensive program where you'll learn coding best practices and develop your technical mindset. One of the main strengths of their program is the balance between teaching best practices, bringing support to students and fostering autonomy and curiosity.

- You spend enough time to learn the basics during lectures or when cracking Le Wagon's challenges.

- You learn how to be autonomous, use powerful tools and have an efficient workflow.

- You are challenged but also supported to ensure you understand the core concepts.

After 6 weeks of training, you build an Airbnb-like platform within a team and you put it in production.

The last two weeks are dedicated to working on your own personal project (or you can work on a project of a team mate), being advised and assisted by le Wagon's mentors.

Rediscover the pleasure of learning

At the beginning, I was one of those to say I'd like to learn to code but did not have enough "engineering background". At Le Wagon I had the opportunity to remember that learning a new skill is not always a question of talent.

With strong dedication, commitment and above all, curiosity, you will find your way and leverage Le Wagon's methodology. At Le Wagon, you will not only be guided but also challenged to make the concept yours. Nothing comes free, and to learn anything valuable, you have to fight for it first!

Learn from amazing people

Amazing people with different backgrounds will surround you. The staff carefully select students to create an efficient and fun learning atmosphere.

From the diversity of your buddies, you'll discover a new way of thinking. Not only from engineers that will introduce you to logical structures but also from litterary profiles who will show you that sometimes efficient wording is worth tons of logical conditions.

The staff is amazing and they are always challenging themselves to improve their program. After a few batches as a Teaching Assistant and then as a Teacher, I can tell that from their 145-batch experience they have built a great methodology and a strong education platform (that I still use!).

Life After Le Wagon

The scope is huge. Lots of your classmates have an entrepreneurial background and will keep working on their project, follow teammates they have met or dedicate to new opportunities.

Some want to become developers and will apply to a junior position. Lots of them get cool offers because they are ready to learn, be productive on their very first day and bring diversity to dev teams.

Others will apply for Product Manager positions and leverage on their dual skills in business / code to collaborate efficiently with developers.

First, I personally decided to start as a freelancer and build apps for clients but also provide them with MVP services, to help identify their product and have a lean roadmap. It was an opportunity to keep on learning every day while I fulfil my entrepreneurial thirst.

Now I have turned this freelance activity into a web agency. We are specialized in digitizing corporate processes. We design & develop simple solutions to complex corporate problems.

I recently finished batch 153 at Barcelona. And i have just one thing to say about that: it worthed a lot. The course is very well structured and make our path easier. I hadn´t any background with code so in the very begining I was scared about my capability to learn code in just 9 weeks. But after I finished the bootcamp I´m very confident about what I learned and now I have one new challenge: change the world.
I started Le Wagon feeling like an old man and now i have many plans as a kid. If you want to be greater than you are know, don´t hesitate subscribe at Le Wagon.

I love tech, but I can’t code. That in a nutshell was the reason that got me to Le Wagon in Bali in April. Tech has always fascinated me and not being able to code bothered me a lot in my professional life as a software implementation consultant.

In just two months at Le Wagon, I learned how to code, how code works, how to transform my ideas into a web app and how to collaborate as a team of developers. I have to say that I had high expectations out of the camp but what I learned actually went beyond what I could have hoped for.

What impressed me ever since the first day of the camp was the online platform offered by Le Wagon and how it is set up, with lectures, tons of exercises, flashcards, videos and a lot of functions available to make the learning process faster and easier. All this incredible learning material, together with the huge enthusiasm and experience of the teachers who were always willing to solve any questions and clear up any confusion, made the camp a truly comprehensive, well-honed learning experience.  Watch my presentation video of the project my team built - Open Space of Batch #149 to see what I am talking about. What also undoubtedly "made" the experience was the sea view from the classroom terrace and the chilled living experience you can find in Bali. I didn't want to leave!

But sadly I had to leave and since I got back to run an online academy at a global IT consultancy firm, I haven't looked back - Le Wagon has definitely increased my competencies and unquestionably given me a ton of useful skills that I can apply to my daily work or any tech projects that I decide to undertake. I can now proudly call myself a coder.

Hi guys,

I’m Michael, I am 29 years old and I got a Master’ Degree in physics (research oriented) in 2014.  After that I decided to travel the world before starting my career but this experience totally changed my mind about physics and what I wanted to do. I always had a lot of different ideas in my head but I never knew where to start to make them alive (especially when the technical part begins). The idea of integrating a coding school was running in my mind and Le Wagon appeared to be one of the most effective so I did Le Wagon Montréal.

Those nine weeks of coding were an amazing experience. Although the first weeks were very hard and challenging I discovered a new way to see things. The content of the courses is very comprehensive and adapted to all backgrounds in both backend and frontend fields.

If you choose Le Wagon you will learn to code of course but not only, you’ll also learn how to launch your idea from the design to the pitch which is a useful skill if you want to open your own company!

Le Wagon is also a great human experience as everyday you work with a new classmate. During the last three weeks you’ll learn how to work as a team on a project using all the knowledge you’ve just learnt and also how to use git which is a powerful team working tool.

I’m currently working as a teacher assistant at le Wagon Montreal to help students with their daily challenges.

I would definitely recommend you to do this bootcamp for the teaching quality, their huge tech network and finally because the mindset there rocks!

I used to be a project manager in a marketing agency specialized in working with law firms. Talking to web developers was a daily challenge as I was their only point of contact in the company and I was not feeling comfortable with it. So, first of all, I wanted to better understand this world. Therefore, I went to Le Wagon Paris and I started a new life. This was the most stimulating classroom environment I did for sure ! Thanks to Le Wagon, I have become a full stack designer at a startup with my best friend whom I met at Le Wagon. The bootcamp is unique and gives you the strength to accomplish the things you would not have imagined possible otherwise... Highly recommended !

I completed Le Wagon’s Fullstack program a month ago. I had joined the bootcamp in order to change career and become a freelance developer. Before that, I worked as a journalist and I had a lot of concerns about my ability to understand code.
However, after numerous great reviews and a positive word of mouth, I was very eager to start, and I have not been disappointed.
First of all, because teachers and teaching assistants truly care about passing on their knowledge and helping us understand difficult concepts.
Then, because coding in itself seems now much more accessible and clearer to me, which enables me to look forward to new opportunities as a futur freelance developer.
Finally, there is the very rich community that you join, you are surrounded with developers and you know that if you get a problem to solve, there’ll be someone ready to help you out. 
This is now my turn to recommend this course a thousand times because of the great memories I kept both on the human and professional plans !

Before I knew it two years had rolled by, I was keen as ever to learn OOP and was based in Barcelona. I finally took the plunge during winter 2018 and left what felt to me was the best job in the world. I contacted the bootcamp and was about to pay the deposit fee. As an act of due diligence I double checked the other bootcamps in Barcelona: I emailed them all to confirm the syllabus and availability. I got an email from Le Wagon and had an interesting conversation with the school’s owner, an interesting fellow called Gus. Le Wagon seals the deal I visited the working environment of Le Wagon Barcelona and was impressed, lots of natural light in a nice part of the city. In-addition, for me attitude is super important — after meeting Gus it seemed the school was genuinely interested in helping students learn to code with a strong emphasis on teaching practical skills, so that students can actually build well designed web applications. I signed up as quick as I could! You define your reality A few days after the bootcamp started it was clear I’d made one of the best decisions of my life. The daily routine was roughly as follows: I travelled to Le Wagon from my home in Tibidabo (mountains overlooking Barcelona) on my Intruder 125 cruiser, a breathtaking daily commute; morning lecture sometimes up to two hours long; a quick caffeine injection at a nearby cafe in which we became the regulars, and then onto practical coding exercises to cover the course material. A number of times I was reminded by the teachers that I may find the pace too fast and not to freak out. Personally, that wasn’t an issue whatsoever. I was used to feeling like a complete moron both in my previous academic and professional life. As an undergraduate Chemistry student and then later as a Masters Physics graduate, not having a clue about what was going on was second nature to me. I felt very much at home. Also I had the added benefit of my professional life where I would routinely go into emergency meetings with engineers, developers and architects from dispersed global teams to discuss real technical problems that were costing us a million euros a minute (until they were fixed), so living under the barrel of a gun was the daily grind for me and I loved it. There were no breakdowns, no moments of get me out of here, of why don’t I understand this? Being humble and accepting there is only so much I can take in during one day helped me avoid any such drama. Instead, I can only describe it as a beautiful struggle defined by lots of inspiring conversations during coffee breaks, meeting new people and learning a lot of web application tech and architecture principles ….very, very quickly. We have a verse in Islam “there is one reality but reality and you define your own reality”. This is written in Arabic all over the Alhambra in Spain and reminds us that our limited time in this world is beautiful, if we choose to believe it.   Birth of Ceziam and the future During the last phase of the bootcamp we work on a personal project and pitch it to the class. I proposed of a web application that was cyber security focused and was lucky enough to be able to work with it with a few fellow students. We discussed it through, developed our ideas and within a few days Ceziam was born. The domain name was bought and we got coding. Ceziam is a feely available and easy to use web application that identifies core Cyber Security risks. What really stood out during this period was how well we all complimented each other, I really could not have hoped for a better project team. We were a real team with a shared vision and importantly there was a very healthy level of respect and trust between us. Our core principle is let’s make a great Cyber Security product and have fun doing it…only good things will follow. So, here’s to living with the wind in your hair, taking a chance in life and trying to reach higher. I don’t know if Ceziam will be widely used, I don’t know if it will democratise Cyber Security but I do know I’ve learned a lot, met many inspiring people and am a better person today. If there is one life lesson I really do believe in: it’s never too late to try! If you have that thing in the back of your mind you know you want to try and you feel it will make the world a better place, then take that first step.   If you’re interested about learning more about my journey, you can find the full article here: https://medium.com/@haseebchaudhary_98209/the-beautiful-struggle-f7df22c7500d