Le Wagon

What I have gone through during my 2 months @ Le Wagon is priceless. There's no place for bullshit, it's just code ! I have learnt (and you will too) the best practices of the industry to build whatever you wish the best/fastest way possible, with the best technologies available (mostly for free) to you.

Le Wagon is the most demanding training I have ever done but also the most rewarding and fulfilling in terms of stuff learnt and people met. You learn something new everyday, if not every hour of the training, and the start-up mindset of the batch is greatly motivating. The lead teacher has 10+ years experience in coding and he knows everything about nearly everything.

Get in touch with them for more info, they are very responsive, helpful and friendly. If you're ready to change your life of course !

I read a cool article a while back, about how coding schools are the new MBAs. Just to be clear, I've never liked the idea of an MBA, especially in Brazil where I thing they're really shallow in their coverage of key topics, instead aiming to attend all types of backgrounds, and in so doing attending none of them fully.

So, I thought long and hard on that, and wanted to really learn something, make my brain work in a way that it wasn't used to. So I stalked the author of that article, Mat Le Roux, who had quite a CV on him, and seemed like he knew what he was talking about, and seemed to be saying the same thing that I was thinking.

Looking at his profile, I saw that Le Wagon was launching in Brazil and that coding really would be something new for my brain, unlike seeing discounted cash flows for the nth time.

After a quick talk with Mat at Le Wagon, São Paulo, I decided to take the plunge, and try go from zero to coder in nine months  weeks. The catch line was brave on their part, I didn't believe it really, I even thought they'd paid people to write these reviews, it's impossible that everybody only says good great things about Le Wagon. So I paid to see. And am glad that I did.

Classes start at 09:00 everyday, and involve two hours of learning the key concepts of web development. From ruby (and programming in general) basics like loops, to APIs and ReactJS. These classes are followed by brain breaking tasks during the rest of the day with your buddy based on those principles, luckily the teachers, and teaching assistants are there when you need a hand.

I'm not going to write everything down here, you can check out the program here if you want a deeper view.

All-in-all, I'm extremely satisfied with the outcome, the last four weeks, me and my buddies put up two great projects, Doacare and NuMooh, the latter of which we're building out as our own little startup.

So, I highly recommend Le Wagon, or any course where you can find a team as dedicated as theirs to getting you to this level with confidence.

 

 

 

 

 

A little heads up on my background, I am a trained engineer and spent 5 years in one of the biggest construction company with a very comfortable position, the kind of position that gets you sleepy up until you retire. No stimulation, no meaning, no adventure.

So I decided to stop the brainwashing routine of Subway / Job / Sleep and leave for another life where retirement is not the Holy Grail, the kind of life Gary Vaynerchuck describes in “Crush it”. YOU ARE the only captain on board, no one should decide how to run your life but you!

It was not an easy decision, you always know what you lose, and never what you’ll get for sure. But if, like myself, you’ve always been passionate about innovation, discovery, creating stuff, travelling, with a geeky side and a knack for new challenges, look no further, Le Wagon Brasil is just for you! Of course you’ll need a little money on the side, the program is not free, but far from expensive if compared with the value you’ll get, trust me.

 

Le Wagon is an awesome bootcamp as other reviews will tell you, but why make it in Brazil? First, you need to know how amazing Brazil is as a country and a culture. Awesome weather, beaches accessible every weekend from São Paulo, and an extremely welcoming culture of people willing to make you fall in love with a lifestyle full of music, churrasco and optimism. Yes the country can be dangerous, but no, you are not going to be attacked on every street corner.

I could not tell you why you should join Le Wagon in Europe, but I can tell you why do it in Brazil. The team is really awesome, the teachers are passionate, with true pedagogical skills and the overall atmosphere is the right combination of motivation and fun. That’s how the magic works. I had no previous coding experience and in the last 2 weeks, I could create this (http://www.calendr.io). Even if I didn’t speak Portuguese, I had online videos accessible during the morning masterclasses and as everyone speaks English in the team, I could ask anything anytime I needed it. And since 80% of your time is devoted to building stuff, I ended up asking a lot of questions about what I could do…

What’s next? I’ll be sticking around in Brazil to improve my Portuguese for sure. But thanks to Le Wagon’s network I heard about an opportunity to work as a developer in Jusbrasil, a startup of Salvador in the promising legal space. The company just received a massive investment from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and as I flew there on a weekend for an interview, they gave me a chance to join their team based on my bootcamp curriculum. I still have a lot to learn for sure but one thing I know for sure is that I won’t have many conversations about retirement there :)

 

Coming from a business background, I founded a crowdfunding startup during my final year in business school.  At that time, I was spending lots of time writing specs and user stories for the developer company we were working with. Our relationships with their developers were great but each product iteration was way too long. For this reason, I decided to get more involved in product development by joining Le Wagon. The skills I acquired enabled me to challenge developers and introduce a lot of good practices into our workflow and development process.

The program has two key strengths:
- A very demanding curriculum that teaches in-depth programming basics and software architecture
- A very hands-on approach focusing on product development's methodology and workflow (heroku, git, etc.)

I feel like the coding bootcamp industry in Europe is getting crowded. Le Wagon main strength lies in its solid program that teaches both essential technical skills and a strong product mindset.

I completed my studies in one of the tops french business school in Paris (ESCP). After five years of business school I decided to start my own company but I figured out quickly that I was massively lacking technical skills. I didn’t know how to work with a developer and had literally no idea on where to get started to build my product. So I just bought a few books and put myself at work. 

While I was starting my coding journey I attended a few workshops from Le Wagon which helped me a lot to grasp basic but essential concepts. I found the team very talented at explaining technical things and the program really appealing so I decided to apply too the nine weeks bootcamp.

The curriculum had very high standards and everyone (students and teachers alike) were really involved into it. I met a lot of great people during the class and 2 years after graduating from the bootcamp I’m still in touch with most of them. 

After nine weeks of learning there was no way for me to go back into a business school oriented job, I wanted to code, and nothing else. Thanks to le Wagon CTO I found a I started a job the week after the end of the bootcamp. That’s how my professional coding journey got started. Since then I’ve worked for two other companies.

Le Wagon gave me the skills I needed to get legit as a junior developper, create values for the companies I’ve worked for and keep on improving my skills at breakneck speed. In addition to pure technical skills, le Wagon also provides strong guidelines and best practice that helped (and still helps) me getting integrated in development teams. The emphasis on code quality and team workflow is really strong, and it turned out to be really really helpful in real life coding experiences (jobs, hackatons, side projects…)

Thanks le Wagon and its team I’m currently a happy developer, alway keen on learning new stuff, and who will probably keep on coding for a few decades at least!

In a previous life, I have been a consultant in management and organisation. After almost 6 years in this job, I decided to quit because I wasn’t entirely happy : I was looking for something more concret, and that would make more sens for me. Since I can remember, I’ve alway though I would become an entrepreneur.
At the same time I quit my job, my brother opened a restaurant in Paris. As he did not have a strong management culture, I decided to help him and I took part in the adventure. I built for him a few tools that unable him to have an accurate vision of the restaurant activity. While I was working on these tools and fighting with Excel VBA, I discovered that I liked coding very much.
It’s at that time that I heard about Le Wagon. I though it could be a good idea to learn how to make web apps, and see if web development was as exiting as I expected it to be. It would eventually allow me to develop ‘real’ tools for restaurant managers, based on my experience with my brother. And finally, I was really exited about joining a new environment with many entrepreneurs.

As soon as the program started, I knew I had made the right choice ! And that impression has never changed.
1. the place is great !!
2. My fellow student ? they are very different : some are young, some are older, some are still at school, others have children, there are lawyers, journalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, advertisers, accountants, etc. There are even girls !! During the 9 weeks of the bootcamp, thanks to the organisation of the program (every day you have a different buddy and there are many events where we can learn to know each other), we have created very strong relations. 4 months after the end of the program, we still see each other a lot.
3. the rhythm is great. Even if a day at Le Wagon lasts 10 hours, it’s build in such a way that it passes really well ! They have found the right balance between theory and practice, and between working alone and in group.
4. the teachers are good, they know where to start and where to stop in order to make us progress step by step. Everybody is really pleasant and patient.
5. The pedagogic materials are really great. Courses are very well made : the slides are really clear and accurate, and you can access at any time to the video of the morning lecture. The exercices that we work on from 10h30 to 17h30 are challenging et fun.
6. The events organized by Le Wagon are really inspiring : great entrepreneurs come and share their experience with us.
To summarize, I’d say that when you enter in Le Wagon, you enter in a community. Then, during the 9 weeks, you address many different subjects and the program is really rich. But everything is made to give you the keys to understand all these new concepts and to be able to go further on your own if you want. Finally : it really works, I can testify that after attending the whole cursus, you really are able to create complexe web apps !

After Le Wagon and for the last 5 months, I’ve been working on Vendome Society : it’s a new market place where professional jewelers can sell their second hand jewels. I’ve developed the whole platform by myself. I will be launched in September in France. After that, I’ll work as a freelance with a few of my ancient buddies from batch18. Working together enables us to benefit from each other’s network, to help each other and have fun which is very important in every job. At the same time, I’ll work on my own project : building a web service for restaurant managers.

My time at Le Wagon Brussels has been a truly transformational experience!
Honestly put, I did not expect to harvest so much learnings from these 9 weeks.
I came in with the aim of developing a web platform for a non profit I launched with some friends, as the cost-benefit of taking some weeks off to learn and develop the platform myself outweighted the option to have it developed by an agency/developer. During the bootcamp, I succeeded in going live earlier than expected, having already a fully operational platform by the time of the final demo day (see www.fovento.be).
But besides learning the coding skills, what has proven very valuable for me is the entrepreneurial spirit all along the way! I actually quit my job right after the bootcamp, feeling empowered by all this good vibe and the newly acquired skills. Now I'm launching a SaaS company, building heavily on knowledge and capabilities gathered during the bootcamp. This great atmosphere is only made better by the great team running the camp in Brussels. These have been very fun days, like a reminiscence of past erasmus stays abroad :) I strongly recommend Le Wagon Brussels to anyone still hesitating about it - just apply and see for yourself!

## How I joined Le Wagon

 

I first heard about Le Wagon discussing with my friends about new startup ideas and essentially the frustration of not being able to prototype those ideas myself. One of them told me that I should have a look to Le Wagon. Fortunately all the requirements / availability were fulfilled and I joined the fullstack program from April to June 2016.

 

## The FullStack program

 

What a time I had! 9 weeks of intensive training with a learning curve that I have never experienced before, even coming from one of the best French engineering schools. The methodology and the staff around make this new world of code and web development very pleasant to get into.The curriculum is smart and progressive, and you've got access to a great pedagogical platform with courses' videos and slides. Very convenient to rehearse during evening and weekend, or to watch some courses again after the 9 weeks. The feeling of improvement is continuous along the program. I really feel learning all these skills would have taken me years on my own.

 

Now that I have finished the program, I feel skilled enough to build a first version of any of my ideas (well, let's say 99% of my ideas, because I can have some crazy ideas sometimes!). Whenever I am facing an obstacle there is always the alumni community to help, which is also the great strength of Le Wagon in my opinion.

 

Altogether this makes Le Wagon one of the best and the most valuable experiences in my education.

Before Le Wagon

As a product manager in a web startup I was working with developers and had always been dreaming about becoming one. So I was helping them coding a bit of HTML and CSS, sometimes some PHP, but couldn't really get further. As many aspiring developers, I spent quite some time on various coding MOOCs, but after a few months, kept feeling dissatisfied with my level as I was unable to code anything significant and was lacking a real teaching structure. At that point, I was about to give up my coding aspiration. That's when I heard about "Le Wagon" from a friend of mine.


Learning @ Le Wagon

I've just finished batch #24 of Le Wagon two weeks ago. To put it mildly, it's been a life changing experience.

When I joined Le Wagon, I had the feeling that I knew a few things about web development, but had no idea how to put them in practice and was feeling totally lost when confronted to the amount of things I had to learn. Therefore, on a given "learning day", I would spend a great deal of time just trying to decide what to learn.

At Le Wagon, I just went in and focused on the material, completely trusting the program in place and the teachers. What a relief it was just having to focus on learning things. Oh, and the result also was spectacular. The whole teaching program has been structured and organised so that everyone gets home in the evening with a new piece of knowledge. From Ruby to Javascript, to HTML/CSS, and up until Ruby on Rails, everything flows and comes together piece by piece. As for myself, it also allowed me to understand many things I had learnt (but not really understood) on the MOOCs before Le Wagon.

Two weeks before the end of the program, just when everything comes together, you start building "real life" projects. You reuse everything you've learnt up until now and still catch up with new things along the way. At this point, I think the results speak for themselves, so I let you have a look at the "demo day" of these projects : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUVEoYr6bA (mine was "Yfebo", second last in the video).

Keep in mind that most of us didn't know a single thing in development two months before that presentation.   Last but definitely not least, Le Wagon allows you to meet great people from the staff, to the teaching assistants, to the students. People with a strong desire to learn, build things, improve, start again. And that also in itself is invaluable.     After Le Wagon   I am currently working as a freelance developer mainly for a Saas company (http://www.yusofleet.com/), and my focus for 2016 is to capitalize on the great kickstart I had thanks to Le Wagon, learning new stuff and improving my skills in web development. Six months ago, I would not have believed you if had told me that I would be web developper within 6 months; and although I still have many things to learn, Le Wagon made it possible for me to start that new journey. 

I was one of the students of the 24th batch of Le Wagon in Paris. After many weeks of search and questions to people having “graduated” from Le Wagon and other bootcamps, I finally took the decision to enrol.

It’s probably one of the best professional decision I’ve taken so far. It enabled me to learn so many things within such a short period of time. I never believed it was possible to learn so much in just 2 months! Their curriculum is extremely fine tuned and we can feel that there has been a lot of iterations to reach such a level. You’re extremely challenged without feeling drowned under too much information.

I did Le Wagon not to become a developper, but to add more tools to my Marketer toolbox and to have fun developing small side projects. I strongly believe that this bootcamp is suited for many different profiles: the marketer who wants to be able to communicate with the engineering team, the wannabe entrepreneur who wants to build a MVP to attract technical profiles, the engineer who wants to have a strong web culture, or just someone who wants to build strong foundation to become a junior developper. I’ve probably forgot many other profiles but you get my point.

One of the big pluses of Le Wagon is also the people you’ll meet there. So many different backgrounds! This creates a wonderful effervescence.

I’d strongly recommend Le Wagon to anyone serious about learning great foundations of web development.

Have fun!

I have just graduated from Le Wagon this month (Batch #24) and what I can say is this: everything you have heard about it is true, and much more!

I was a consultant for three years and always had this idea at the back of my mind to become a developer. Too bad for me I thought, it takes years and years of laborious studies to become one, right? Well, wrong.

Become an autonomous developer in 9 weeks

The program is very well calibrated and allows anyone with any level or prior knowledge to understand the basic concepts at first, and then put it all together during the final weeks and working on projects.

You will learn a lot, but don’t be afraid, there is ample time to practice during the day through the exercise platform, which is absolutely fantastic. You will also be paired with a random student which will provide you the opportunity to either learn more from him / her, or learn more helping him / her. And if you get stuck, teachers and teaching assistants are always at your service to help and give you insights.

After all this time, you will have benefited from all the best experience you can get, and look back with great pride at what you’ve achieved in 9 weeks.

Learn from a truly great staff

Everyone at Le Wagon is 100% committed to your success with a level of expertise of the highest standard.

The great thing about le Wagon is the entrepreneurial spirit they have been able to create, always ready to talk to you if you have any question regarding Le Wagon, your project or anything else whatsoever.

Don’t forget the “apero-talks” with successful entrepreneurs from the real world and a seemingly unlimited amount of beers in the fridge

Meet your amazing fellow students

The best part of Le Wagon is the overall community of students:  everybody here is motivated, curious and willing to do something out of the ordinary. I have never met so many people from so many different backgrounds.

Overall, this was definitely one of the most enriching experiences of my life.

 

If you want to see for yourself, you can check out the project I have coded @Le Wagon during the last two weeks with my team (Arthur Vinson and Guillaume Degermann) : http://www.yfebo.com

I'm Marina. I've been an advertising copywriter for 8 years (a typically literary profile, zero tech experience). 

And then I did Le Wagon, and now it's been a year and a half since I've been a fullstack web developer in a nice french startup who has recently raised several million euros (www.brandandcelebrities.com, come check it out - and we're hiring developers!). Here are some questions I wish someone had answered me before I joined Le Wagon - it would have spared me lots of useless stress.

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## Can a non technical person become a coder?

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The answer is “Sure!” - if he or she wants to. Coding is actually not harder than learning a new language (even easier, if you ask me). When starting Le Wagon, I was a bit worried that coding required some special mathematical talents that I did not possess. Well, the good news is that it doesn't. 

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At least at the beginning, common logic, good googling skills, attention to detail will be enough to create a nice-looking website with basic features. And the second piece of good news is that people with communication, marketing or business background usually are pretty good at all those things.

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If your ambition is to recode Google - that's slightly different. But there's more good news: if after Le Wagon you still feel like doing so, you'll have a nice base for further self-teaching.

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## Do girls actually code?

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Oh come on, some of the best Le Wagon's teachers are women, why wouldn't they! There's nothing particularly “male” about coding, and the fact that we currently see more guys doing this job only means that the niche of women coders is huge. Honestly, every programming team would be happy to have a girl or several!

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## Why Le Wagon and not another bootcamp?

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To have some credibility, a coding school must have a decent looking web site. And let's be honest, all other Paris web development courses have the ugliest web pages on the Internet (No thanks, that's not exactly what I’d like to learn!). 

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Le Wagon has a foolproof programme that helps to cover the essentials of web development in a record short time. 

And thanks to the continuous exercises, you actually learn everything they are teaching. It's hard, it's intense but it's really working.

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Since my graduation from the course, I've seen many developers who come from engineer schools. They are great for classic software dev with C++ or Java. 

BUT how many startups use C++ or Java? So, after 2 months Le Wagon alumni are more operational in Ruby on Rails than most young engineers without real web development experience. Our code looks cleaner and we use more Rails specifics than highbrow CS majors.

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## Are all the alumni secret geeks? Will I be surrounded by nerds during the two months?

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Come to think of it, we do discuss new frameworks and deployment problematics at lunch breaks, is that what nerds do? But the thing is we actually enjoy it, and if by any chance you don't, there're lots of Game of Thrones discussions going on too, and beer outings, and pizza parties… Wait, this does sound geek after all!

But I still think pretty much everyone will meet likeminded people at Le Wagon, maybe future colleagues or cofounders and most certainly good friends.

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## Is there anything wrong about Le Wagon?

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That's the question the staff ask all the students at the end of the course. And of course, Le Wagon isn't perfect, cause everyone has something to say.

But guess what? The biggest problem is that people just don't want to leave! The most frequent complaint is that it's too short. Students want to learn more Javascript, maybe more frameworks, machine learning, artificial intelligence… It's true that AI is not yet a part of the curriculum. There're certainly many other things that aren't covered but the fact that the alumni want to learn more technologies means that Le Wagon actually gave them this appetite. We learnt to not be afraid of learning new complex things - I'm personally following a classical Algorithms course right now, together with Node.js and Python courses.