Le Wagon

I started Le Wagon in October 2015 and it was the best decision of my life !

The reason :

« In the new economy, computer science isn't an optional skill. It's a basic skill » - Barack Obama

I’ve always been interested in technology & innovation and how these two are transforming our world. Being able to understand and actually control the tools that are now ruling the world is in my opinion mandatory for everyone in the future, so I had to learn it myself.

The one thing that struck me the most during the bootcamp is the amount of knowledge and skills I developed in such a short period of time. I give credit for that to the amazing program they developed . The way the program is structured and the resources they provide is THE real added value of this bootcamp ! Another great added value is the Alumni community. They make sure that you are well connected to every people that has already been a Wagoner and that you can ask questions, find jobs, find partners and so on.

One important thing to know before applying though, is that Le Wagon has a clear entrepreneurial angle & mindset! Throughout the bootcamp, we had introductions to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship concepts/tools, so if you have no interest in entrepreneurship AT ALL maybe it’s not the best option. However I think that even for non-entrepreneurs these concepts are super interesting, whereas for (aspiring) entrepreneurs, it’s a huge added value!

As a result of my bootcamp, I ended up developing BOOSTin, a growth hacking tool for brands on Instagram. With BOOSTin, brands can get relevant data about their own activity and their competition’s in order to increase the efficiency of their marketing activity on Instagram.

In definitive, I would TOTALLY recommend Le Wagon to anyone, from anywhere, at any age, with any background. It is a life changing experience.

I am alumni of Le Wagon batch #3 (September 2014). Here is my story since I graduated.

Before Le Wagon

Before joining Le Wagon, I studied web-marketing during 2 years but did not like the way it was taught, so I quit. I really wanted to be able to develop my own products at the time. That's why I decided to join Le Wagon, which seemed to be a very product-oriented program which teaches you programming but also gives you good practices and tools to build a tech product.

Just after the program

I kept on working on TrackGuru (https://www.lewagon.com/blog/interview-thomas-chretien-trackguru) the MVP I had developed within the two last weeks of the program. The platform reached 500 subscribers, but it was taking me too much time for marketing / communication, and I decided to take some distance and go back to programming smile emoticon

After being a TA (teaching assistant), I joined Le Wagon's team as frontend developer to increase my expertise under the mentoring of Sebastien and Boris. In less than a year we released Le Wagon Ondemand (https://ondemand.lewagon.org/), the Alumni platform (http://alumni.lewagon.org) and the new version of Le Wagon's website (the current one). I learned React.js, sharpen my CSS and Javascript skills and, of course, kept on doing some Rails.

Adopting a digital nomad lifestyle

That was a crazy year! My coding skills increased exponentially and I also learnt a lot about myself. After a year of coding I took some time off, I moved to Brazil for some weeks and I spent time in front of the Ocean, enjoying Yoga lessons. Quickly I realized I missed coding. I thought about my TrackGuru experience, and I decided to launch a new product, same style, with a different angle, and of course new skills! I took time to analyse my mistakes, and to refine what will be later Hubum (http://www.hubum.com/).

Hubum is the Product Hunt of electro vinyl albums releases. The idea is to allow users to discover the vinyl release culture, and to become a reference digger in this niche. What we need to know is that all labels are working closely with techno artists to produce their vinyl release. A vinyl album is a bit as a story with a lot of protagonists and substance around the material. Releases fans are crazy about it, and represent a constant community, sensible and engaged, always looking for good new sounds, favouring quality to quantity.

In parallel, we try to engage a maximum of our curators/guests by inviting them to share in exclusivity their discovery on the platform. The challenge is to find renowned influencers (artists, youtubers) willing to help us. Some great names join us already: Audu Simion (hubum.com/andusimion), Moskalus (http://www.hubum.com/moskalus)), Hurfyd (hubum.com/hurfyd)…

Next step

I like the digital nomad lifestyle. I want to continue teaching at Le Wagon (Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels), travel, make some freelancing and personal projects, and keep learning new stuff every day.

I am really grateful to Le Wagon. It's crazy how they helped me develop my coding skills so quickly. I can know build all the products I want.

But above all, they also helped me find myself and work and live my life the way I want.

I was a student at Le Wagon (batch #6) and then a Teaching Assistant for couple of batches.

THE 9 WEEK EXPERIENCE AND BEYOND
For me Le Wagon is not only the kickoff I needed back then to get up to speed with start-up best practices and gain coding skills but also, what I've realised one year and an half after completing the bootcamp, a resourceful and very active community on a day to day basis.

The experience of Le Wagon goes way above the 9 weeks of the bootcamp. We have an alumni platform that gets improved all the time, almost weekly events to keep up with code improvement as well as start-up best practices, and four huge (free) parties per year to meet other batches émoticône smile

Not to mention the amazing group of friends I kept from this 9 week journey.

ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL
Although not everybody would benefit similar output going thru this experience. After being a student and a Teaching Assistant I would highly recommend Le Wagon to 3 main profiles :

- Entrepreneurs
- People who want to become full-stack developer
- Product owners, growth marketer and people who will work on a daily basis with developers

If you have one of these profiles, you can’t get wrong with Le Wagon and the program will benefit you almost immediately.

Personally, I find myself in these three profiles. After working with several start-ups as a freelance developper, I’ve finally joined a French start-up as the CTO (https://www.bobdepannage.fr/la-team-bob-depannage/) and my work is now a mix of code / product management / entrepreneurial thinking.

CONCLUSION
You have two main questions to ask yourself.

- Is a coding bootcamp the best way to accelerate/change my professional path?
- If so, which one to choose?

For the first question, I hope I gave you some insights about things to consider. For the second one, you should really not hesitate, Le Wagon is a great program! If you live within 45min where Le Wagon is (yes it’s 9 intensive weeks and you better reduce your commute) this is definitely the coding bootcamp you should go for.

I was one of the students of batch 4 in Paris (end of 2014).

Being a student at Le Wagon helped a lot for my career in tech. I had a growth marketing background and really needed to have a technical perspective to be better at my work.

First, the hard skills you learn over there are very valuable. I can now build MVPs with Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS by myself. I can also tweak websites - which is useful to implement tracking codes or make some changes on frontend for instance. 

Second, it enabled me to understand coding culture and to be able to collaborate efficiently with developpers. This is a substential strength during my everyday life at a startup. I am now able to be more relevant with my ideas that require technical work; being able use Github or to chat about APIs is also useful when you are surrounded by developpers!

Last, the people I met during the program are high quality. The students are mostly entrepreneurs and share a great mindset. The teachers are super smart & encouraging. Also, Le Wagon being embeded in the Paris startup scene, I met several pretty impressive founders (Algolia, Front, Sunrise...). 

In a word, Le Wagon enabled me to be more powerful as a person. I don't feel stuck by my lack of tech skills anymore. I definitely recommend this coding bootcamp!

Life changing experience, literally
Attending Le Wagon was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It really changed my life. I met great people, learned extremely valuable skills and found a community I will always be part of.

My classmates
One of the most enriching aspect of le Wagon (apart from the coding skills) was the opportunity to meet people with such fascinating stories; it didn’t take long for all of us to become friends. Everyone came at le Wagon with a different background and personality and discovering so many interesting people was an amazing experience. Lifelong friendships were forged, undoubtedly we’ll cross paths with each other at future jobs, and I’m even starting a company with two of them.

Teaching and staff
I am really grateful to all the teachers at le Wagon. They are the best instructors I have ever had. They don’t just give you the theory and exercises and then let you in the dark, oh no their method is well-structured to really get rid of pedagogical frictions and give you an "optimal" leaning experience. They have this ability to understand that each of us is a different learner and cater to the needs of each student.

But it’s not only teachers and every day, you can also rely on great teaching assistants (former students at Le Wagon) who help you every time you need and spend time to dig deep in your code with you.

Conclusion
Le Wagon not only gave me the knowledge but also gave me the opportunity to meet the people I work with every day. We continued after le Wagon and decided to create our company together. Everyday we keep learning and that feels good! Now that I know about coding I feel like I can address confidently any investors or tech guy because I know what I m talking about. For an entrepreneur it makes a big difference trust me!
You can take a look at our demo day here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SQFIIR0O8 at 14'10"

I’ve been a student at Le Wagon for the 9-week program in June 2015. I have been creating websites for 10+ years, but had almost no  backend skills and felt limited when I wanted to create more complex and intelligent things.   The program gave me exactly what I was looking for: an intensive ruby and rails course, best practices and tools, cool front-end tips. I am know able to do a MVP of any basic product in something like two weeks, which is an amazing skill to have I believe.   The other thing I liked a lot is the entrepreneurial/cool spirit. Students were open-minded and fun, and le Wagon’s team is always there to help and to drink a beer.   I kept strong links with le Wagon, working as a teacher assistant for the next batches and they even hosted my new company, Mangrove (www.meetmangrove.com) for a few weeks. This new venture feels like a logical path after le Wagon, keeping some of the same spirit and using skills I learned during the 9 weeks. 

Hi,

I finished Le Wagon a year ago doing their 6th batch and this was the biggest (and coolest) shift in my life. Here are some details about Le Wagon.

 

Intensive and focused on best practices

The curriculum is really challenging. Some stats to illustrate my point: you get to learn five different "languages" (ruby, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL) not to mention the libraries and frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, jQuery, React). The pace is fast and you've got to work hard, with 50 hours of code per week to really benefits from the program. In addition to the great courses by experienced teachers, Le Wagon has developed internal tools and learning platforms (with lectures and videos) that help you digest best practices and be autonomous at the end of the 2 months.

Startup ecosystem

9 weeks is short but enough to dive deep in the world of tech startups and adopt this culture.

I was a perfect newbie and I easily became "startup-fluent" through contact with Le Wagon ecosystems, through meetups, talks, and workshops organised every week.

I loved going back to school and to fill in a batch atmosphere with coding buddies who became real friends spending my whole time with us during this 9 weeks. Le Wagon builds a great community of alumni and I enjoy being one of them. We take pleasure to meet each other through Le Wagon weekly events or around a beer.

Great Program, Great Staff, Great Projects

I discovered a high-quality curriculum built like LEGO where each piece improves and completes the previous one, and where you always code a library by yourself before we give you the built-in tool for that. Morning courses are provided by great teachers. Sometimes a bit fast (event if 1h30 long) but then you get helped by awesome teaching-assistants during the day. The last 2 weeks of the program are dedicated to coding your own project and the results are just great: https://www.lewagon.com/fr/alumni

Learn to code, boost your profile, change your life

Students come to Le Wagon with different goals, choose yours. I was private-teacher in Mathematics, Physics and Biology during 5 years after a Master degree in Marine Biology. When a friend told me I should follow Le Wagon fullstack program, I thought that would be cool to add this skill to my teaching offer, and why not start doing some freelance dev with it.

So I enrolled it and it really changed my life. One week only after the end of the bootcamp, I was already working on freelance missions for a startup. After a year of code for different projects like thepixeler (a digital artwork sharing platform), MaShareEcole (the school network for parents in France) and MissionBiberon (a MOOC for parents having babies), etc.. I finally joined Le Wagon as an official teacher and developer.

As I told you, very cool life shift.

The objective of Le Wagon is to teach its students how to code, and how to code well. As a result of this, students learn programing by communicating with each other while working on projects, and ultimately creating a rich ecosystem of knowledge that iteratively builds upon itself, week after week throughout the 9-weeks.

Le Wagon has been one of the best investments I have ever made. I build the 1st version of my startup "MedPics" thanks to Le Wagon and I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to learn codes and begin a start-up.

I was batch #02. It's seems a long time ago now !
2014 you remember ?
At the time I wasn't even aware how this bootcamp would change my life forever.
As a filmmaker I was even convinced that coding was not only a boring activity but also something very rigid. I couldn't be more wrong. What I learned at Le Wagon gave me super powers. The way they teach programming challenged my brain. Sometimes I even felt like I won't make it, but the staff was awesome and they never let me down. At first, I struggled to understand the point and seeing the big picture. Learning, ruby, object oriented programming, building an ORM or an MVC from scratch wasn't making no sense to me. It was like getting LEGO blocks without knowing what they would be useful for. But the staff was like they knew what they were doing, so I stayed confident and eventually a few weeks later I started to experiment a series of thoses orgasmic AHA moments. Then I realised how creative programming could be. Now, I'm confident coding any MVP project I can think of. I feel like it's a whole world of opportunities out there for people like me who never opened a Terminal window before. I keep on learning with the Alumni Meetups and by being a part-time teacher assistant at Le Wagon. The curriculum and the tools to learn that are given to the students are even better know. Sure if you come at Le Wagon you will learn to code the hard way but this is the right way.

Hi ! I was one of the students of batch #11 in Paris (07/2015 - 09/2015) and I worked as a Teacher Assistant at Le Wagon. Here's a fact-based review of the full-stack training.   TL;DR   Life changing. Le Wagon + (whatever your background) = <3. After Le Wagon, I've worked as a back-end developer at Brand And Celebrities, a Paris-based celebrity marketing platform for the past 6 months. I'm now moving to the San Francisco to work at Scalr, a cloud management platform.   Why Le Wagon ?   As a business school student, I suffered from two pains :

• I had product ideas, but I couldn't realize them or either test them because I was not really able to code.
• I felt like my business school degree wouldn't be enough to land my dream position / found a company. I was missing out on something.

The folks at Le Wagon solved these two pains. Because of its focus on entrepreneurship, Le Wagon is not yet another coding bootcamp. It's the best training for any aspiring entrepreneur.   The 9 weeks - What I Learnt   At the end of the 9-week program, I was able to :

• Clone within one week Airbnb and pitch our product MVP in front of the community.
• Upgrade my skills through online resources way easier than before (I never completed an online tutorial before attending Le Wagon).
• Have conversations with experienced developers or engineers, understand their mindset and work with them.

At the end, you'll be fully proficient in Ruby. You'll know how to shape up your website with the latest trends in front-end development. You'll be a master of Rails, the framework behind SoundCloud, Airbnb, Shopify & GitHub. You'll build a business in an afternoon thanks to APIs. You'll experience coding as a team with Git & GitHub. You'll feel the stress before the final production release.   Disclaimer : You'd better be prepared.  Do as much as you can before you actually start the training to avoid missing the boat. Learning how to code is absolutely engaging, but it does require a lot of hard work. I found myself coding ~ 75 hours / week. And loved it.   The People   Your network is your net worth.   I've had the chance to meet amazing people during and after the 9-week training. Since I also worked as a Teacher Assistant, I can tell you you'll never be alone. There's always someone to give you a helping hand, whether it might be a buddy, an alumnus or a teacher. The background of  the participants is incredibly diverse : businessmen, artists, designers, architects, lawyers, engineers, ... We've been having monthly reunions with the folks of my batch. I was co-opted as a back-end developer by a Le Wagon alumni. I'm going to work with a friend from my batch. We have an alumni platform where we can ask for help, find job, and find resources. You can attend to monthly meetups about code (like Paris.rb) or entrepreneurship (Le Wagon Meetups). Its community is really what makes Le Wagon stand out.   So is it worth it ?   Absolutely. Le Wagon's been a game-changer for me. I would never have done so much in so little time without it, and I could never be more thankful to the staff for that.

I was one of the student of Le Wagon Batch 10 (https://www.lewagon.com/program) in Paris in June 2015.

Where to start ?

Well, let's start with the course: The 2 month bootcamp is just perfectly balanced, well paced and it covers everything I need to bootstrap m project. You start with the core of class programming, you then discover DB management and the MVC pattern. I found the exercices well designed, they suited my learning curve. We then spend 2 weeks on front-end development, spending time on important front-end pattern (layout, flexbox, component design) and javascript/ajax techniques. Once everything is set up, we discovered the rails framework and then each lesson focus on a very pratical aspect: user management (devise), facebook connect, geocoding, mailing. Each day was really rich!

The 2 weeks project

The last 2 weeks are focused on coding your project in team. You can join a team or propose your project to other students. I wanted to start my startup project and so I did! Once again, great experience! Teachers and teacher assistants helped us to work as a team, to develop good habits on GitHub. We had a series of things we wanted to do that we hadn't seen during lessons: No problem, the coaching staff were just happy to help us on specific notions and problems. In addition, I also benefit from "product" oriented coaching and pitching advices.

Community

Spending 2 months with 30 other students, working hard, helping each other is an amazing experience... At the end of the bootcamp, you just don't want to stop gathering evryday and learning together... I feel like, it's the same thing for each batch. At the end of the day, the community just grows stronger and bigger! For every new project, you get tons of feedbacks and helps, job opportunnities are passed between each others, new resources are quickly discussed, etc. The community is just great during and after!

To finish this long review... I DO recommend this 9 weeks program, it enabled me to start my new company (http://www.openloge.fr), to take freelance missions, to meet great people and to just enjoy time working.

Learning to code should be mandatory. It's beginning to be taught in colleges and highschools across the globe, and those of us who don't get on board now will find themselves in a sticky situation in the not-so-far future.

Having lived in the US and being exposed to their tech culture, I believed I had to join one of the well known bootcamps over there to acquire the necessary skills to become a developer. Thankfully, a friend recommended to join the Wagon and I decided to give it a try. Now, a couple of weeks after the end of the course, I can say it has been the best step I could take at this point of my life.

Not only have I learned the necessary skills to confidently start off in a company as a junior developer, I have also been provided with the right tools and mindset needed to continue learning independently after the course. Add to that a great alumni network, where everyone is always eager to help out and contribute to the growth of the community, and you have the recipe for an amazing coding bootcamp.

I highly recommend Le Wagon to all fellow aspiring developers, you are about to embark on the journey your career had been waiting for ;)