Le Wagon

I joined Le Wagon in July 2017 in Paris during my gap year. I am studying in a business school and it was the first time I coded ever.  While initially sceptic about the possibility to become a coder within a few weeks, I acquired thanks to a  9-week intensive program the necessary skills to be on the right track. Le Wagon coding program provides all the tools needed to learn how to code a web application. The strength of Le Wagon bootcamp is in its community for several reasons:

 

-    Staff / Teachers: Thanks to all of them, Le Wagon is not a coding bootcamp but an experience. Learning how to code is not easy and requires discipline but the staff makes sure that you are not left behind and have fun.

-    Class / Events: you are always working with the other students on the exercises so the staff will do its utmost to create a warm and friendly team environment by organising activities, lectures and parties.

-    Job Opportunities: according to the one’s wishes, the staff and the community will help you to find an opportunity (web development, consulting, project/product management) or freelance contracts.

-    Community-Mutual-Aid: The community is very active, events are organised, job offers are shared and whatever the issue with your code, just post a message and you get the answer within a few minutes (!)

 

I accepted a job opportunity as a web developer 15 days before my graduation day. As I underlined, in addition to the quality of the teaching and of the dedication and support of the staff, the experience is by itself amazing and very rich. Thanks to the community, this experience with Le Wagon is still going on!

Baptiste Horn Batch#83 in Paris

Technology is something that I always liked, that's why I decided to major in computer engineering. It was that moment when I started to love coding, as c++ was the first programming language I learned my passion for coding started to grow. I wanted to know more and increase my knowledge in that aspect. While online courses may teach you the syntax, they can't teach you how to solve problems or think in various ways to reach a certain solution.

 

After searching for something different for a while I found Le Wagon Tokyo. At first I was a bit hesitant to take the course as I was short on time and the course took place in Tokyo (Japan) which is very far from my country. I didn't even know if it was worth it , but i must say I'm really glad that i took it.

 

It was well worth it as it doesn't just teach you how to code, it teaches you how to think , to actually be able to solve a problem. Then it goes to teaching you everything you need to know on how to be able to build a colorful website, backend to frontend and how to use that knowledge to start your own projects or even work as developer which was my main goal from this bootcamp.

 

But furthermore, it wasn't only about coding and programming, we also had many activities there such as yoga sessions and group lunches. I personally met many many great people, from teachers to students and many others. I've gained many experiences from each of them, we worked together daily from 9AM to 7PM each day with a different partner, which in a way taught me how to work with different people and bonded the students together as well.

 

After graduation, I was finally able to call myself a full stack developer and I knew i was able to create any website I could think of. I honestly never imagined i could learn all of that in just 9 weeks, it was just GREAT.

 

Before Le Wagon Tokyo, I was teaching English in South Korea. I always had an interest in coding but I could never manage the time or the patience to teach myself after regular work hours. I was a bit reluctant at first to do a bootcamp. But after I read all of the rave reviews online about Le Wagon, I figured it was time to take a chance. I signed up for the first batch in Tokyo.
The course is as intense as everyone says it is. You get out of it how much you want to put in. You might as well push yourself if you're going to join a bootcamp, right? All of the exercises or extra work have a purpose in improving your skills. I still look back to some of my old code or lessons for helpful reminders.
The final project/pitch was a great experience that really challenged me in ways regular code work couldn't: working with peers, managing time, and meeting expectations. All of these are things that I deal with on a regular basis now and I'm grateful for the practice I had.
Afterwards, I found a job fairly easy. I was setup with a lot of contacts from the tech scene in Tokyo through all of the Le Wagon events. I'm currently working for an e-commerce startup that does a lot of work on Shopify. We develop apps, plugins, you name it, to help merchants and consumers in Japan. To this day, I still talk with a lot of people through the program and will be forever grateful for it. 

I always knew that I wanted to code, but I was afraid to try as it seemed to me as something very difficult at that time, so I spent about half a year doing various online courses, but I still couldn't build anything by my own. 

That's where Le Wagon shines, it doesn't simply teach you the syntax of the language, it gives you the mindset you need, it teaches you the way to approach a problem and solve it, because coding is not about the language syntax, it's the easiest part in fact, breaking down the task and finding the ways to build/solve the task is what coding is, syntax comes very easy when you know what you have to do. 

The pace of the course is fast and I can say that it was pretty intensive, but you'd be surprised of what you can build after only 9 weeks of Le Wagon.

Le Wagon far surpasses any of my previous learning experiences! I’d even say that it’s more fun than most vacations I’ve had.

If you’re considering this course, you’re going to go through three stages:

Stage 1: You are skeptical that you can learn to code in 9 weeks.

I live in San Francisco, have had a career in operations in tech companies, and I am surrounded by coding bootcamps. There is literally one 500 feet from my apartment. Given my exposure to tech, and living in San Francisco, I was extremely skeptical that I could adequately learn full-stack development in 9 weeks abroad.

But, I decided to go with Le Wagon London for two reasons: The glowing reviews and the diversity of students (international and non-tech backgrounds). My goal was to learn full-stack development and make new friends from different walks of life.

Stage 2: You realize how hard coding is, and how good Le Wagon is at teaching it.

The first few weeks are spent learning the core fundamentals of programming and Ruby. The second half of the course is spent learning front-end, database, and rails – which includes a lot of real-world examples such as geo-location and payment processing.

The coursework is tough and the pace is grueling (close to 8 hours a day of coding!), but you have ample help with teammates, TAs, and the teachers themselves. I found it difficult even though I understood most of the core concepts before I came to the course as I had worked on the operations side of SaaS tech companies previously.

Luckily, the teachers are BRILLIANT. They are able to explain concepts so that anyone is able to understand them. That takes an extremely special skillset that all the teachers seem to do so easily.

The TAs are from previous batches. These are prior students who are helping you solve problems when some of them literally learned to code 9 weeks ago, which is amazing!! It was really helpful to learn from them, as they understand exactly what you are going through.

Stage 3: You realize that you get so much more than the amount you paid.

When I completed the bootcamp, I left with much more than I expected. I made genuine connections with my classmates, and surprisingly with the teachers and staff as well. All of them are so approachable, caring, and friendly. They want you to succeed, which is definitely something that’s missing from the San Francisco / Silicon Valley scene. These are people that I laughed with, cried with, and partied with during the 9 weeks. There was no forced interaction, it was all very organic, and they are now all friends for life.

You also leave with an extensive and international network of developers via SLACK that no other course can really compare with. It’s a huge network but it also feels very accessible. That is invaluable!

After telling my family and friends about the program. Many of them wanted to do the program! One of my friends already started the batch in Tokyo and she is loving it. My wife (who is a lawyer and has a great career) wants to go do an upcoming batch just to have a great experience and learn more about tech.

As for me, I’ve started working on my own ideas, and have even started learning Python on my own. My advice to anyone reading this is to do Le Wagon even if Ruby isn’t the language you want to learn. You will leave with a completely new mindset that will allow you to learn other languages rapidly!

I had a terrific experience @LeWagon Bordeaux Batch #85, never learn so much in such a short time. The atmosphere is super friendly and yet very professional. The teaching staff is dedicated, passionate and experienced. 
I chose Bordeaux for 2 reasons. First, the entrepreneurial ecosystem is exploding and not saturated yet. Second, I am an outdoor lover. Having the beach, the countryside and Spain within easy reach was just a blast !!
I joined the Bootcamp to gain legitimacy and technicity as a product manager in the tech industry. Also, now that I know how to develop an MVP I am eager to launch my own project! ;)

I’m Robby, alumni at le Wagon in Paris (batch 83).  I didn't know anything about coding before joining le Wagon. I was just a business analyst in the tech industry who wanted to learn code to have larger tech skills valuable in the industry.  I can say that I am not disappointed, I was even surprised by the level that I acquired in only 2 months.  
This was the most exciting and intense summer that I had in my life, every day was a challenge but it was worth it. The program is well constructed, you end up knowing the back-end (you develop in Ruby with the framework Ruby on Rails) and the front-end ( you learn Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3). I discovered at Le Wagon that I can build anything that I have in my mind, being able to code enables you to do that.  most important takeaway from my time there is the way of learning, I feel that I can quickly learn any programming language. 
For a person like me who didn’t know how to Code and who finally built a music streaming app for influencers is just insane. And towards my initial goal who was to make valuable my skills in the tech industry, I can say that the skills I added to my profile were a strong added value that allowed me to land a job at Amazon Web Services.  As a matter of fact, nobody should hesitate to join Le Wagon, it is a good investment, it is worth it.

Before Le Wagon I was in my third year at Queen Mary University. While studying, I founded a P2P learning platform where students can learn form other students that aced their module. We had over 60 hours of tutoring during the 2 weeks of testing. I felt I needed technical knowledge to take my business to the next level and let me tell you that Le Wagon did not let me down! 

The program consists of 9 weeks of pure hard work. I learnt more at Le Wagon than during my 3 years at business school (and I was a good student). But the best part of it is the people. I met the best teachers I ever had there and made amazing friends.

So if you are willing to excel and make the best out of your time don't think it twice and join Le Wagon.

Le Wagon is surely one of the best experiences I had in my life, even more than I could have expected!

Before the bootcamp, I studied engineering and I was taught high school students, but I wasn’t really satisfied with my work, my studies and the environment.

I’ve always been really curious about modern technologies and the start-up world, so I decided to try to understand how all the instruments we are using today are working, searching the web and following online tutorials to learn how I could build some prototypes of ideas I had in mind, but I found out that online tutorials were’t enough for me to really learn to code and build my own products, so I decided to look for a coding bootcamp.

After some researches on the internet I found in Le Wagon the place that perfectly suited my needs and applied for a summer course in Lisbon… the best choice I could have done!

The way the entire bootcamp is organised is just awesome! All the people involved, the drivers, teachers and all the other students, were from the first moment amazing and always friendly.

The first weeks of the bootcamp are focused on Ruby, a very modern and powerful back-end language, and are really hard if you are not accustomed to staying all day at a computer, but once time passes and Ruby notions are quickly building up along with front-end languages, it became more and more fun!

The second part of the school is focused on Rails, an incredible framework built on Ruby, that allows you to build amazing products with very powerful features.

Learning to collaborate is also a very important step, and the final weeks of the bootcamp are all about collaboration: students are divided by groups and they have to build and deploy a web app in 2 weeks.

At the end of the bootcamp we had a great event where we presented our products, 7 amazing final projects built from 26 students from all over the world in just 2 weeks, and I felt very proud of everyone!

My groups final project was Papyru, an education platform that allows students and teachers to connect. We had to work really hard but we were all amazed by what we were able to accomplish in just 2 weeks!

Is very sad to finish the bootcamp, you really wish it could last forever! I made a lot of connections with awesome people and now I feel I have the freedom and the tools to build anything I want. I loved it, I’m still living in Lisbon working with the amazing people I met, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who’s into technology and wants to change his life!

I was fresh out of University and excited to join the work force, until I found myself with 3 years worth of theoretical knowledge… but no hard skills. I decided then and there that I wanted to: learn how to code, meet people in the Tech industry, and travel to a new country. That’s when I found Le Wagon.

I’m so grateful that I did, because I got exactly what I was looking for. At Le Wagon you learn from skilled and dedicated teachers. You meet new people pursuing similar goals. You become part of a highly active tech community. Also, most importantly, you get 9 weeks of being engaged and challenged (that was my favourite part).

As a candidate with these in-demand skills, I now stand out in my applications to multiple research programs. In the future, I hope to join a start-up and have more learning experiences. I feel that opportunities have opened up to me and for that I can thank Le Wagon.

Before, I was in the Real Estate business. I needed change. I had always been very attracted to entrepreneurship. Therefore I decided to join Le Wagon and it happened to be the best decision I made these last years! It was an incredible human experience! We learnt a lot of stuff in 9 weeks, including several famous web languages. Your business ideas also grow up during the program. You get to meet people who are in the same mood, and Le Wagon's reputation is very beneficial for what you do afterwards, whether you want to create a startup, find a job, or to start a freelancing career. I totally recommend it!

Before I started the wagon, I was a civil engineer in Paris and I was looking for a new challenge for my professional life. When I heard about the wagon formation, I had not any skills in web development or programing.

I spent nine week-end, in Lille at Le wagon for learning code and how to build a website. Firstly, le wagon has amazing tools to help students to progress and train on good exercice, that expérience was completely different from my study at university. I think they build a new way of how explain coding to students. The programs is divise in different part of topic such you  approach all the different sections of a website.
Secondly, Francois Xavier the wagon driver and his teacher’s team organise a really good monitoring of the students, they take care of each of us during the 9 weeks, and follow that we progress in coding.

I would highly recommended this formation to everybody who wants have good skills in coding, it’s will really change your professional life, and open you doors that you couldn’t imagine !

It might be cliché but doing Le Wagon Montréal truly changed my life. Before the course, I was not working or studying anything related to coding or computer science. I came from a background of hockey refereeing, sound engineering and video editing. After completing Le Wagon Montreal’s 9 week coding bootcamp, I am still working and improving upon the final project we built in the last 2 weeks of the bootcamp.  I learned how to build a website from scratch in just 9 weeks and now I’m using those skills to keep building the website for my business: zebrasclub.com. I also met a lot of incredible people because of the Wagon Talks, which provided access to entrepreneurs and influential people in the Montreal tech industry. That being said, the most important part of my experience is that I met great friends from around the world, and we continue to collaborate on my projects as well as theirs.

I have a degree in Humanities, and an assorted professional background in customer service, tourism, teaching, and NGO work. I spent the past 10 years moving around countries and continents, enjoying every job and place a fair bit, but never feeling completely satisfied with what I was doing. I didn’t dislike any of the jobs, but at the same time I felt stuck and like I had already plateaued. I’ve always loved (using) technology, so I’d been eyeing coding for a few years and started several free online classes, but even though I always enjoyed the coding itself, the online courses never really stuck. I just felt like the tech world was so distant from everything I was, that I always ended up slightly lost and discouraged, with no idea what to do next. I know that some people are fine learning like that from scratch, but for me it wasn’t working. I did really, really want to learn, but I felt like I needed something more concrete to start from, a network and solid basis, and Le Wagon gave me just that!

The course in itself was great. It is overall well thought out, you get a bunch of theory in the first three weeks (which I personally loved...not everyone does, and it is not always easy to understand why you are learning it during those first weeks, but it is so useful to have those basics later on even if you don’t remember all of it, trust me!), and then you learn how to actually make things that work and are useful! My final group project was a web app to connect refugees with potential employers in their new countries, so I learned how with coding I can still make things that are connected to my, completely different, professional background and personal interests. Everyone is a tech person, and everything can be made better with tech!

Apart from the curriculum, the most important part for me was the support of the teachers and TA’s, and the rest of the group. I think at Le Wagon they understand that group unity is important to make the learning easier, so there is a special attention to that. I truly felt supported by everyone all the way through, and that made a huge difference on the hardest days when none of my code seemed to be working!
Another great thing at Le Wagon is that they know and believe that you don’t need a previous background in tech to learn coding! Everyone who gets in has the ability to learn this skill, and you will always be reminded of it if you ever feel bad about your pace of learning! Remember that it is a massive amount of work and learning done in 9 weeks, so you will feel overwhelmed often. There wasn’t a single person in my batch who didn’t go through at least a few days of learning hell (I had way more than a few ;) ). Just run with it, let the adrenaline carry you (but don’t forget to sleep and have fun during the weekends as well), and you’ll see that all those hours will eventually amount to something, even if it seemed like you weren’t achieving anything at the time!

My advice is to definitely do the bootcamp if you want to learn coding, and don’t worry too much about the immediate results. You’ll have all the learning materials available forever to practice and learn better, and professional developers have to look things up all the time anyway! It’s not about memorising data. Put in the hours of work, talk to the teachers, support your classmates, and you’ll come out of it with tons of inspiration, a new mindset, a new approach to work and learning, and a complete new understanding of coding.

I still have A LOT to learn about coding, but before Le Wagon I felt intimidated by it, like a small club I wanted to get into but wasn’t cool enough for. Now I feel like I’m already part of it, I know how to learn, I sort of know what I’m doing, and can’t wait to do more of it! I am excited (rather than scared) about my professional future for the first time in years, and that alone was worth all the bootcamp hours in the world!

I was a college freshman with an interest in computer science before I joined Le Wagon. I have minimal knowledge, however, about coding and project management before the bootcamp.    I really enjoyed my time at Le Wagon---there were so many things to love about this program. First and foremost, I learned a lot in this two months. The experience of mastering Ruby on Rails, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in two months was a hell of fun. The learning curve was steep and the workload was heavy, but somehow the mentors made the learning process challenging as well as entertaining.    After this bootcamp, I got so many opportunities open up to me. The alumni group has job postings nearly every day. I got an internship at a tech consulting company right after the bootcamp. Moreover, our projects with NGO in the last two weeks also inspired me to start a club at my school, using what I learned in this bootcamp to help local non-profits achieve their goals.   Last but not least, the people at Le Wagon were 120% inspiring. Every one of the people I met in this two months has some exciting life stories to share, they were the kind of people that you would love to grab a coffee or pull an all-nighter with. Working with people from around the world with different experience also taught me how to be a better team player and how to communicate effectively.   I highly recommend this bootcamp to anyone who wants to learn new things, meet passionate people, and build cool shits.          

Hi, I am Florent and I’ve been studying at le wagon last summer during 2 months. It has been an incredible experience and I did not mind for a second trading sunny holidays for a 2 month intense coding experience. 

I graduated 2 years ago from a french business school and then lead operations in a startup in Paris. I wasn't a tech guy even if I usually had to deal with tech issues in my previous job. But no coding experience. 

During 9 weeks, I’ve been able to: 

- Get skills in Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML/CSS, SQL : I am now working as a UX Product and Web Developer. Which means that after Le Wagon, I am able to lead a basic RoR website. I still need to improve my coding skills to build complex applications but Le Wagon gave me the tools and knowledge I need to be able to level up on my own. (i.e. during the bootcamp you build an Airbnb-like which is considered as a basic app)

- Learn from amazing teachers : Teachers are part of Le Wagon community and they are really good and very dedicated. You can feel their common will to push you moving forward everyday.

- Meet awesome friends : I am currently making projects with friends from my batch. It was a good opportunity to meet persons that share same interest.

- Be part of Le Wagon community : which gather thousands of great guys all around the world ready to help you.

If you want to build a MVP for a project, improve your coding skills, turn to product / UX jobs or just learn new skills, go for it, it is one of the best investment I have done so far :)

What can you do in nine weeks? If you start a sport and take 9 intensive weeks of classes you'll barely be a beginner, if you take up a hobby (i.e. woodcarving) in 9 weeks you can do simple stuff. 9 weeks ago I was a finance graduate with no will to go and search a job in finance, with tons of ideas and no know-how on how to make them a reality. 

If you're thinking of joining the Le Wagon family you might see some similarities in the identikit above, so here's how it works:
Let's not sugarcoat it, it's tough. There will be times where your brain simply won't cooperate (first few weeks in my case) but don't panic, it's normal, your brain is getting bombed with tons of new information. I was a student of Batch #93 London, and in the second week of boot camp I was attending the reboot classes (when you have some ideas of what you're doing but you're not entirely sure, they'll make you attend catch-up classes, best thing ever). The only coding experience I had before joining was copy-pasting command line commands from Google in a Linux vm just to have fun. So, in London, you'll find amazing people that are there to help you, any problem or thing that's not clear just file a ticket and remember everything will make sense once you start the Rails part of the program! At Le Wagon there is not the education system style where teachers are teachers and students are students, the people that are teaching you and helping you out on tickets are alumni of the course (so if they made it why shouldn't you?), every Friday evening you're out with your classmates and teachers drinking and partying.

A few tips: 
- Do the online prep work
- Really do the online prep work and don't google the answers for the codecademy tracks. 
- It's better to arrive at day 1 over-prepared than under
- Ask questions, don't worry your classmates are in the same boat as you
- Be curious, the people in front of you are an immense source of knowledge that will answer everything, and if they don't know the answer they'll sit down with you to help you figure it out.
- Enjoy it, you're about to embark on a 9 week long journey that will really change your life, even if you're attending the course and not planning a career shift you'll see things differently after the course. 
9 weeks ago I was a finance graduate with ideas, now Le Wagon gave me the tools to create what I want, I have a hell of an mvp and people would actually hire me!

After seven years working at Goldman Sachs in London and New York, I took a sabbatical. I was looking for something different while capitalising on my business experience. The appeal of the Tech start-up industry became strong to me and I was looking for the best way to transition into this exciting ecosystem. Rated the best coding school in Europe & the World, I decided to roll-up my sleeves and do Le Wagon’s bootcamp in Paris.

Le Wagon’s promise: take motivated people with no coding experience and get them to learn how to develop web apps in nine weeks! How? With an extremely well though-out program, a highly competent teaching team, a fantastic educational platform and access to an ever growing alumni and network of start-ups.

From back-end to front-end, you get up to speed smoothly thanks to the balance between classes and coding challenges. There’s true support from the pedagogic team and all the right tools to help you succeed. Plus, beyond pure coding skills, you get to learn how to design a product the start-up way, dev as a team as well as how to master the many services you need to use to launch an app.

After six weeks, that’s it: you are ready to develop an Airbnb copycat in five days, final step before the last two weeks dedicated to your personal project. Promise held!

Le Wagon’s bootcamp it’s also getting into a mindset. It's a culture of learning, creating and even thinking. And if it’s foremost about coding, it’s also about the people. Be it other students, with their broad range of experiences and profiles or the pedagogic and management team, it’s one of those places where you only meet top individuals. Doing Le Wagon you’ll get the coding skills, the mindset and the network.

And when it ends…It’s not over! Lifetime access to the platform, connections to the best startups through events or newsletters, and even the opportunity to continue your training by becoming a teacher’s assistant. If you’re hesitating, trust me you shouldn’t. Don’t wait any longer and just apply!

I was one of the student of batch #77 in Montreal (summer 2017) and my only regret about LeWagon is that I didn't apply earlier !!
I'm currently studying in Entrepreneurship and before even starting the program, I realized that I had one major issue that I tried to solve without success. I had loads of ideas, but I couldn't transform them into a product that I could test and promote because I was not able to code by myself. I tried different online classes, CodeCademy, Treehouse, Udemy to name a few. After a year or so, I realized that I was not progressing fast enough. It would take me years to be able to code MVPs. 
I looked online for different coding bootcamp. Le Wagon was the one offering not only a coding bootcamp but an access to a network of 1500+ alumni. Needless to say that being a part of that family is incredibly helpful in every aspect. The platform offers you access to a ton of content as well as design feedback, job opportunities, etc. Plus, every single question is answered in a matter of hours. It is by far the most disciplined community page I've seen. 
On top of that Le Wagon is not just another coding bootcamp, the learning process revolves around two main topics. Coding is the obvious one, but entrepreneurship is also a big part of is learned. It would be the best training for any aspiring entrepreneur who wants to know how to code and have a better understanding of the technical part of the projects. 
What an experience it was, while I'm finishing my entrepreneurship study, I am still impressed by what we learned in just 9 weeks. I can now work on ideas and products I wanted to code and have them finished before the end of the year. 
It was 100% worth it and you won't regret it, stop waiting and go for it!!

I discovered coding by chance during an internship a few years before Le Wagon in a startup, and developed a real interest in the digital world from this point. I joined Accenture Digital for a job after this internship in order to do consulting around digital. After 2 years of working on digital projects between clients and developers, I felt the need to grow my technical skills and thought a bootcamp of a few weeks would be perfect. I decided to join Le Wagon because it is the best bootcamp in France and, luckily, also one of the best in the world. Plus, I had collected nothing but very positive feedback about this training from my friends / network. 

I presented this project to Accenture as a sort of short MBA specialized in Digital, and they were thrilled with the idea.  These 9 weeks of intense coding were probably some of the most enriching weeks of my life. The quality of the teachers, the real learning challenge set by the day to day pace, the new connections with really cool and interesting people, the Yoga classes... I truly recommend this bootcamp.   I am now back within Accenture and am in charge of implenting chatbots at my client's, managing a team of developers. I think I can say this bootcamp enabled me to build an interesting profile, both business and technical.   Thanks again to Le Wagon.   Stop thinking and just apply !