Le Wagon

I'm Frederic, I'm 40 years old and I started my career as a former civil engineer and worked in audit and finance for many years. Within the last 5 years, I launched 2 startup projects. Through my career, I've also been working as a bloodstock agent (I buy and sale race horses).
As I was looking for new projects in the start up world, I heard about le Wagon FullStack bootcamp. At the beginning, I was not looking for a school or something like that a all.But after some researches and talks with friends, I realised that it could be perfect for me. I never had the ambition to become a fullstack developer, even when I considered doing le Wagon but I always had this little lack of technical knowledges that made me thinking I wasn’t speaking the same language than the developers. I found out that Le Wagon could be the answer and it was indeed.
If I have to sum-up my experience at le Wagon, I will say that:
-    It’s 9 full intensive weeks, but he program is perfectly size for this time
-    The methodology is very good/innovating and everybody enjoys both the curriculum and the rythme.
-    You meet a great bunch of people with different experiences/ ages/ backgrounds and Le Wagon's network increase the value of the program.

Long story short: if you are thinking of doing le Wagon do not hesitate, go for it.

In England I was an Engineer, it was a good, stable job but I was bored. I kept thinking ‘it will pick up’ or ‘I’ll get that promotion next year’. One day I woke up and realized I had been waiting for years for something to happen. After an embarrassing amount of time I decided to take the plunge into coding and after a good bit of research, I choose Le Wagon - specifically Le Wagon Bali. Firstly, the Le Wagon syllabus is masterfully set out – they give you the arduous approach to a problem first, and then teach you the simple/succinct approach so that you know what is ‘going on under the hood’. This sounds painful but it works perfectly! It gives you an understanding of a concept in a matter of days, whereas otherwise, it would take weeks.
Secondly, the way each day was structured forced you to think like a developer from day 1. The days starts with a lecture (with Q&A etc) and then moves onto daily challenges with the full (and completely invaluable) support from the teachers, and then ends with a live code session where the whole class completes a task together. This structure immerses you in coding – think learning another language while living in the country of origin.
Finally, the resources Le Wagon provide during and after the course pay for themselves. I finished the course a month ago, and thanks to free members-only Le Wagon course on React, I am now a freelance fully remote React Developer; I spend my days bouncing around Asia, living in flip flops and drinking coconuts (I know, the dream right?).
Three months ago I was sat in a cubicle waiting for my life to become interesting, and now I’m sat in a cafe in Vietnam wondering whether to move to the Philippines or Taiwan. Le Wagon, quite literally, gives you the tools to change your life.
To anyone reading this, stop waiting and take the aforementioned plunge. Stop sitting and waiting for your job to interest you, or waiting for your employers to appreciate you – take the plunge. My only regret is that I didn’t get involved with Le Wagon 3 years earlier.

I came to LeWagon without any previous programming experience, so everything was new. I did a little research from the start and I quickly find out that this was the right choice! There I obtain tech knowledge mainly in Ruby (on Rails), but left as a Full Stack Developer. Such as Javascript, CSS, HTML, SQL/Postgres.

The whole staff was really nice and the classroom environment was good and easy for learning. We used a platform called Kitt that had all our lectures (that lasted about 1:30h in the morning) and from then coding exercises until the afternoon. When the 9 weeks course is over, we still the unlimited access to Kitt and continue learning.

We had some companies that went there and gave us a perspective of a real dev work day. That was really nice and the networking that we get out of it is extraordinary!

A big thanks to all the LeWagon crew that made this great bootcamp possible!

Before Lewagon Lisbon I was a chartered accountant and worked for three years as a Financial Auditor. Watching how the work was done in such an inneficient way I decided to teach myself how to code excel and eventually started asking if this was the right job for me.
Luckily I have two great friends who are also programmers and pushed me forward to take a 180degree shift in my career and I’m só glad I took their advice by heart. The whole tech and web industry has always fascinated but for some misfortunate reasons we’ve been always separated until I joined the bootcamp.
Lewagon Lisbon not only helped me how to write code and develop a product from zero to production but also how to work in a team and more importantly how to think like a programmer.
Definetly not only an experience one should try for curiosity and expand their skillset but also if you wanna change your career and start fresh. And make no mistakes, lewagon is not only a coding bootcamp but also a network of people who’ll be available for you anytime you need.

I'm an engineering student, finishing my degree. I love tech and had a little experience with code before. Le Wagon was the best choice to jump deep in this world, as I wanted to turn more digital. It was an awesome decision that I'm really happy now to have pursued. I feel ready for a job as a developer, product owner, and more. I had big expectations, and they were surpassed. Amazing how fast we can learn and the environment is just amazing! I miss it so much already. It made the experience really unique. I loved meeting people with different backgrounds and coming from different places, but with the same goal: dive into code! #Rio 230

I was offered the possibility to join le Wagon as part of my Master’s Degree at HEC. I had heard about le Wagon through a few friends who had previously followed the bootcamp. They had all finished with stars in their eyes and amazing job opportunities/offers so I jumped on the occasion ! I was not disappointed.

Indeed, le Wagon offers a great combination of hard work, excellent guidance, great people and good fun. You will learn how to code with Ruby on Rails, using Javascript, ActiveRecord, SQL and many other languages and first and foremost you will learn how to build and design a user-centric product.

I am currently teaching assistant for the following batch of students at le Wagon. I am now learning how to explain difficult concepts and solve students’ problems.

Thanks to the technical skills, the bootcamp has brought me, I have considerably broaden my career perspectives to jobs such as developper, product owner or IT consultant. Furthermore, I now have access to a lifelong network which has already proven to be of great help.

I would recommend this bootcamp without hesitating to anyone looking to earn technical skills, to take a step in their career or even just to open their mind to web development !

I was an optician before starting my Wagon training in january. I really wanted to change careers and I especially wanted to turn to digital. After some research, I decided to embark on the adventure, and 3 months later, I am trained and ready to look for a job as a Ruby fullstack developer. The Wagon is by far the most beautiful adventure I have ever known, it is above all excellent teachers, a fantastic school, and an unbeatable network. Once you've done The Wagon, you'll come to a very close and enthusiastic community, which will always be there to guide you in your entrepreneurial choices, or to help you with a line of code.

The Wagon was one of the best experiences I had attending school!
Not only did I learn very useful skills  regarding my carreer, but it also feels like I am now part of a great network.
Everything lead me to a carreer in business, but thanks to Le Wagon, I can now access so much more opportunities (developper, PO etc)!
As for the courses themselves, they are very interesting. Thanks to the method “learning by doing”, we could improve our skills very fast and become full-stack developpers in only nine weeks. Last but not least, the atmosphere at Le Wagon is great, it really was a pleasure to wake up and go learn how to code everyday :)

I have been thinking about following Le Wagon bootcamp since the day I heard about it. All the people that knew about it were unanimous. So when my school offered me the possibility to follow The Wagon bootcamp as part of my last year of studies, I didn’t really hesitate.

All I can say is that I wasn’t disappointed. With all the expectations I had in the bootcamp, it still found a way to get me positively surprised.
I really was eager to learn about coding, it’s really the field of study that motivated me. I wasn’t really thinking about my career, or that it would look good on my resume, it was all about learning something that I find deeply passionating.

That is the thing with this bootcamp I guess, you find yourself in an environment that enhance that motivation. Everybody arounds you is also eager to learn and motivated (including the people actually working there). All the tools that Le Wagon developed are amazingly easy-to-use and help you get caught in the « game ».

So yes, it is an intensive bootcamp, but you learn so much, and more importantly maybe, you enjoy all the process. Once it is finished, it is really when I realized all the things that I have learnt, the new way of thinking that I developed. All the pieces put themselves together, it is a great feeling.
Also, Le Wagon’s ecosystem is impressive, all tech companies know about this formation and value it, it definitely opens many doors.

The formation is amazing, the environment is amazing, the network is also amazing. I would do it again without any second thought !

you would think the slogan is a bit cheesy for Le Wagon but they do in fact change lives. Mine was one of these, I would have never foreseen the amount of change that came into my life from taking a le wagon bootcamp.

It has been 4 months since the end of my bootcamp in lisbon. I have been working in a family office fintech startup in brussels for the past 3 and a half months. One of my colleagues for the bootcamp final project liked my work and recommended me to his CTO, I had the job interview the day after the final bootcamp day, they rest is history and I haven't looked back yet. I really enjoy what I do, too much maybe, you could say. The need to adapt and figure things out as you go and the availability of this type of information on the web makes it a very interesting market to work in. Where as before I would struggle to pick up basic notions on these topics now I like the challenge of having to figure something out without any prior knowledge. We are building test driven api endpoints for a big contract and porting the whole app to a more segmented frontend backend microservices style one and this will involve getting into many fields and topics to study. We are now looking into graphql for the ease of development it brings to the front end development and the centralization of the routing in the backend.

My background was slightly different than what you'd think would be a usual case of a student of a programming bootcamp, but it turns out a lot of people from different backgrounds are looking for things like this more and more. I would soon find this out when meeting the rest of the classmates. I was an ok student in high school, I did one year of economics college and just didn't like it so dropped out and went to work. It wasn't exactly as cut and dry as that, I was young and immature so a lot of this work involved more lying around and wasting away then actual work but suffice to say that I didn't have a degree and was bouncing around in low qualified jobs learning the ropes of life. at some point when I was 25 I got into cleaning up myself and my life so started to treat myself better, workout , read, etc. WHich led to being slightly obsessed about cooking healthy food which led me to cooking school and a small career as a cook. Worked in hotels, pop restaurants, coffee shops, all you could think of and even river cruises, all hard and challenging in their own way.

I did always have in the back of my mind that I wanted to quench an old thirst of learning programming since my teens, all of it seemed very fascinating to me. At one point whilst working for a vietnamese pop up restaurant I signed up to volunteer for web summit. Back up a little.. My brother is a tour guide and he once had a tourist in one of his tours that ran a bootcamp similar to le wagin in barcelona, with former big tech employees the whole nine. He later told me about it and that the guy was interested in hiring my brother as a salesperson for him in portugal, the deal was that if he could sell 9 of them the 10th was free. My brother always looking out for me told me he owl give me the tenth. I was immediately fascinated with the prospect of such a thing as a bootcamp for programming, it was the first time i learned about the concept. I researched it a little but it was eye gouging expensive so there was no way with those crap jobs I had that I would have any money for it anytime soon. SO i parked the idea and filled it down in recesses of my mind. Back to web summit, when your there to meet a bunch of different people especially as a volunteer, I got to talking with this one volunteer and he was like so what's a cook doing at web summit. I told him I was itching to get into tech and was eyeing this super expensive bootcamp in barcelona but would have to park it for now, he just told me dude, i'm doing this bootcamp right here in lisbon and its way more accessible and a really good company. This was when I found out about le wagon, he told me about the local discount and the location and really brought home to me how great the organization and flow of it was. He was a former lawyer in brazil and had really no tech background nd told me it was fine for all types.

As soon as I had a computer with internet connection in front of me I was researching about this new found discovery. I was hooked this was it I had to get into this, so then before next year's web summit I was already signed up for the fall bootcamp. The process was straightforward, I had to rush the interview tech challenge because I had a long trip planned to poland. Emily was super nice and made it very unintimidating, I paid the deposit and got the prepwork. It was a lot of prepwork but it was very important. I felt like I was paying for something I had been anticipating for along while and even though it was sometimes hard to grasp what I was learning in that prepwork I had to take it seriously and finish before the boot camp. I didn't take it with me to poland so when I came back 3 weeks before the bootcamp I was cramming all day and night. It's not something you can do in a week let me tell you, so take it seriously.

The program had a good mix of organization and support, that was the thing that most stuck out to me over the months. It was really quite surprising, Kitt which is the internal exercise system they have was really impressive. The markdown they used made it a pleasure to read the exercises, eventually I felt excited to tackle the daily exercises. I was hooked, but the balancing act that the team plays with skill is managing to maintain a relaxed atmosphere whilst expecting so much from the students. In a sense it is almost self paced at least for the duration of that day then it resets the day after. Beer and dinner friday, getting to know the rest of the colleagues with pair coding. The model of morning lecture and then the rest of the day with tackling the exercises is perfect. I really enjoyed it, I couldn't know really how much I really had anticipated it. I had gone in with an open mind and no expectations, at worst it would give me closure at best it would catalyze my change of life and direction. When it got to the final project we already knew each other all very well, pair programming and the dinners had made sure of that. So I presented my idea, like anyone else who wanted to, no one was forced to do it, if you had an idea you could otherwise whatever. The voting system for these projects was another really impressive thing done with some sorting algorithm based on a bunch of data, all very high tech and once all the talks were down we had our teams. Turns out I didn't really know my team but we had a great idea and that was the cool thing.

One of the team members, the one that would later recommend me to his boss. Worked for this startup and used trello but felt the need to get more visual feedback from it so that was the basis of his project idea, get more visual KPIs from a trello sprint board. All of these lingo was super foreign to me and even though I didn't know him I felt he had the most relatable real world idea. We had almost nothing to go with at the start, for almost half of the first week we almost did no coding just to figure out how we were going to get data from trello boards into our app. Straight from the go we were ambitious, we wanted to connect to trello api and get data from a aboard onto out app and then display it. Every step required a lot of fanning out from complete darkness and the unknown, from figuring out omniauth 2 factor authentication for trello. Reading through their documentation, we even landed on luck with a great ruby wrapper around the trello api which was very well written and thus a great lesson in ruby source code. Eventually we even tried to go beyond and get webhooks working that would send back to out callback endpoint any updates from the trello board, the glory and icing on the cake was having our team mate demo the app on trello, make some huge change in the cards and watch it change the statistics on our app. Very rewarding.

Conclusion, learn to code and change your life, go to Le Wagon.

After a year and a half as a business analyst in a tech start-up I felt like I had a good understanding of our business and market. However as many of us with non-technical background, I was clearly lacking a certain number of skills in order to understand the development of our core product. I told friends about my very early mid-life crisis and met with someone who convinced me to go for Le Wagon’s bootcamp in Paris despite not having coded anything in my life. After the first few days, the fear of failing had completely vanished - Le Wagon somehow found the perfect balance between supporting students and teaching them to reach the autonomy they’ll need as junior developers. You also get to meet with awesome people who you will want to train with every day. Le Wagon is a family with such a great spirit that you always find a way to come back for one of their many community events.
After the bootcamp, I left my business analyst position and I quickly learned Python to work in data analytics.