Le Wagon

I spent more than four years in a consulting role, before I decided to take a break from my professional career and learn a new skill, coding, which I was personally interested in for a longer time, however lacked time, discipline, and most importantly a structured and already proven approach to learning.

Due to personal recommendations of friends, I checked out Le Wagon and immediately felt that this was exactly what I was looking for. This impression was confirmed when I had an initial chat with Rich, the driver at Le Wagon in Berlin.

From my perspective, three points were particularly valuable about the Le Wagon experience:

1.) Very nicely structured programme, which challenges both experienced as well as totally inexperienced students to a degree that optimizes learning for everyone without feeling lost. They have implemented an awesome mix between morning lectures, which teach the fundamentals for the daily exercises, as well as subsequent challenges and live codes to apply the daily learnings and gain practical routine.

2.) Online additional resources and network

Since the bootcamp has been around for quite some time now, there is an almost endless amount of additional resources to continue learning during and after the bootcamp. Also, Le Wagon now builds on a very strong community of more than 5k alumni which are very eager to help on coding problems etc.

3.) People

Great set of fun people with very diverse and interesting backgrounds, yet everyone is very focused and committed to the course.

Would highly recommend this!

I decided to learn coding because web apps are now everywhere and in every sector, from the simple food delivery app to the army simulators. My initial project was to develop skills in web development after 3 years in 3D realtime infographics specialised in VR and in Augmented Reality because coding would be a great addition to my skills. I chose Le Wagon because I had got great feedbacks from my brother who had previously done the bootcamp in Shanghai, but also because of their teaching methodology and their well-known reputation both inside the French tech ecosystem and on the international level thanks to all their foreign campuses.

After many years of studying and of ‘alternance’ work during my studies in Digital Marketing, it became clear that knowing how to code was vital if I wanted to evolve in this sector. Le Wagon is a school that was recommended to me by several colleagues, one of whom went into the bootcamp as a working professional and another as an SEO expert. Compared to all the courses I have completed throughout my studies, I have never learned so much in so little time. It was very demanding, especially at the beginning but you quickly learn to adapt and get into the rhythm of things. At the end of the course, I came out with real hard skills. It’s a course that forces you to learn and work together with other students by constantly helping each other.

In 2018 I started my gap year, enjoying the fact that I had the chance to be self-sufficient as I pursued anything I wanted to do. Even before joining Le Wagon, I had taken an interest in the idea of coding, asking what few people I knew with experience to guide me where they could to a starting point. But coding very quickly seemed inaccessible. Everyone I knew was already part of that world, and whilst each friend had a different way of getting into it, I felt as if none of these were options in my situation. I saw coding courses advertised, but didn’t like the idea of going back to a school system so soon after leaving it, until I was told about Le Wagon. Coming into the offices to speak to Alex felt easy, and his explanation convinced me to sign up and start saving. This for me was the best part of the bootcamp; you are immediately put at ease by the friendliness of the teachers, who explain things clearly and patiently, and more importantly never treat you as just a student. I needed the community atmosphere at Le Wagon as this was the first time I felt able to “be a part of” the coding world, and it gave me a greater drive to learn more. The course was intense for sure, but I never felt like it was a burden to come in, so for me it became very easy to lock in and focus on learning. The course itself is amazing, as every day you are exposed to new ideas, and then given the rest of the day to test them out, and learn about them yourself. If they were particularly challenging, there was always someone on hand to help you one-to-one, be it another student or one of the TA’s, so you never felt stuck at your desk, completely at a loss.
The ability to work for two weeks on an idea you have is equally incredible. We were given full support from all the TA’s to help flesh out our design, and refining it to make a working, beautiful website. It struck me every day of the project weeks how strange it was that just a month before, it was hard to remember even the names of all the coding languages. On this course you are given a great opportunity to be welcomed into a world that can seem daunting, whilst they provide the learning materials and proper community needed to push on from the last day, and continue your progression from wherever you started, to becoming a full fledged coding god. It is an experience I won’t forget, and one I’d recommend to anyone.

After my school closing my software engineering program in the middle of the semester, I was left scrambling for what i should do next. I could apply to more schools and take an extra year to graduate, while repeating much of the same material, OR I could take advantage of knowing something about software and design, and take advantage of the time I suddenly had free, and join a coding bootcamp.

I picked Le Wagon for a few reasons. They have great campus locations around the world, so I could pick the one closest to me. They offer a well rounded curriculum within a fair time frame of nine-weeks, making sure students are at least introduced to the topics employers are actively looking for. They advertised their alumni network, and with over 5000 alumni, you can be sure to always have a place to ask questions and make connections. After the bootcamp, they offered help with getting your first developer job, with resources at hand to help you have the best CV and the skills to write a killer cover letter.

They can do all this, at a fair price point that makes my idea to go back to school seem almost laughable. But are the companies hiring on board? Actually yes! They even had a career day and introduced Students to companies in the area, letting us see what employers expected from bootcamp graduates. We could immediately judge just how much progress we can make in 9 weeks and how ready we were to start a career in web development.

If you are able to work hard to achieve your goals, and aren't afraid to end up dreaming in Ruby, then I strongly suggest you consider Le Wagon. They will provide you with not only the comprehensive skillset of a professional developer, but also with a community and a network of passionate people, and memories to last.

Working as a Head of Distribution for Villa-Finder, my role was divided into different responsibilities amongst which some account management for our top villa owners, villa “hunting” and helping the company transform its business model.

I had always been curious to “what was behind the scenes” and mostly I had many ideas of websites/apps that I couldn’t launch myself. I had no clue what to do and was very frustrated with my lack of knowledge!

With my final project, Le Wagon helped me bring an idea I had a few years ago to reality! And I am continuing it now!! It helped understand and build web apps beyond the “simple” HTML & CSS I had already approached. Doing Le Wagon has also helped me in shifting my lifestyle with more freelance opportunities.

I can highly recommend the Le Wagon full-stack 9-week bootcamp to anyone interested in or just curious about coding. I joined the bootcamp in April 2019 in Bali and was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the student body as well as the content of the camp. I joined LeWagon after I had difficulties communicating with developer teams and wanted to close the communication-gap. After the programme I am surprised how much I love coding myself and that I will definitely continue down this career-path.

Over the course of 9 weeks you will learn the entire skillset of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, SQL, HTML, and CSS which enables you to build a fully functioning web-application for your end-project. The student-teacher ratio is superb and the teachers do an amazing job in guiding you through the vast material every step of the way. It is definitely a demanding course that will be difficult at times but it is absolutely worth it! I surprised myself with how much I can learn in such a short time-frame and want to encourage anyone and everyone to join LeWagon and enrich your personal skillset.

I have a background in Outdoors Intervention and being an outdoor guide, which might be the complete opposite of computer programming. However, I wanted to change career and keep the outdoors for my leisure time, and learn the problem-solving world of coding. I hesitated for several months to register for Le Wagon Montréal’s Bootcamp, only because of the price, which is why I took online web development courses before deciding.

In the end, I decided I really liked coding and would get a lot out of this intensive Bootcamp. A big aspect that attracted me to it was the intensity and efficiency of the learning process; and it did not disappoint. The curriculum, to me, is the Bootcamp’s greatest strength, and it’s built perfectly so that every day, you keep learning and practicing new material, and you learn in 9 weeks what would otherwise take a lot more time and motivation.

I love their hands-on approach, where you attend a lecture in the morning, but then get to practice and actually code yourself to assimilate all of the material; it’s the best way to learn for me and, I believe, for many people.
The personal experience is also great. It’s really fun to live this intensive course with a small group of 26 people; we built nice friendships and got to work together in teams on challenges and bigger projects. There are many events we can attend, where we can get to know everyone from our batch, but also alumni from previous batches, and many entrepreneurs or developers who come to share their knowledge and experience.

My final project was a plant-based cooking recipes website with many features, and I built it with my 3 teammates during 2 weeks. It was perfect to learn the whole product creation from scratch and work with a team, organize our schedule and tasks, use git and Github…

In the end, I found a job right after the Bootcamp (the first Monday after the course!) and am currently working as a web developer, to continue my learning!

I definitely recommend this Bootcamp to anyone who wants to learn to code from scratch, or has a little experience but wants to go further and learn faster than on their own or at a public program. But be prepared to give it your all and challenge yourself for 9 awesome weeks!

Coming from a non-tech background, I tried learning coding by myself before Le Wagon, but I wasn't really successful. Le Wagon gave me the right tools, exercices and challenges in order to learn web development. Plus, it was also a really fun experience and gave me the chance to meet people from all backgrounds. The project we developed during the last 2 weeks was really intense and gave me some real insights on how to build a web app from A to Z. It's really amazing to look back and see all I have accomplished in only 9 weeks.