Fullstack Bootcamp

Le Wagon brings you into a community that lasts long after you graduate. This was such a thrilling experience full of laughs, hard work, and great connections to peers and startups in Montreal, Toronto and all around Canada.

I've only got good things to say about Le Wagon. They do exactly what they say: change your life by learning how to code.

I wrote my first Hello World in Python in 2018. I enrolled on Le Wagon in 2019, and now I'm working as a freelance developer with my first job within 3 weeks fof graduating the bootcamp.

For me, Le Wagon stands out from other bootcamps because of its curriculumn: firstly, its product-oriented; and secondly, its focus is on Ruby / Rails. But they also have excellent teachers and a brilliant teaching platform (Kitt), as well as a global alumni network you can access through Slack.

Unlike other bootcamps (to my knowledge) Le Wagon is product-oriented. The last 3 weeks of the course you'll be working in a group of 3-5 people on a final project. It's a great way to expose yourself to agile developmnent, design-thinking, and gitflow. These are practical skills that you can only really learn by doing, and Le Wagon provides you with a great environment to do it in.

Their curriculumn focuses on learning how to learn: they teach you the industry best practice and design patterns that are going to be used by agenices worldwide despite what programmnig langauge they use. For example, my first commercial project used Vue JS. But I picked it up super quickly and did not feel disadvantaged by taking a course based on ruby/ruby on rails. I'm confident now to learn by doing, and that's something that Le Wagon gave me the skills to do.

That's always a major sticking point. People ask why the course is taught in Ruby. Well that's because the syntax in ruby is super easy for beginners to pick up. This is because (unlike JS) it's a programming language built from the grounds-up with a sophisticated design philosophy underlying its architecture: it's meant to be a human-friendly language. As a case in point, some of the handy syntax improvements in ES6 (implicit return, template literals) existed in ruby for years! So overall, ruby is fun to program in, and it's a brilliant medium to learn the basic programming patterns that are langauge agnostic (such as MVC). All good reasons to study in ruby.

But if you are anxious about learnng JS, React, Redux etc, Le Wagon actually offer an alumni track on these frameworks on their platform, Kitt, that is super good quality.

And finally, there's the amazing talent that backs the teaching of Le Wagon. The teachers were all excellent quality. We had UI practitioners as TAs during product sprint week. We had backend developers teaching us during the SQL and Active Record week. The course was well structured; all the teachers were personable; there was a wide variety of students and teachers alike; and there were happy hour Thursdays every week at teh coworking space.

You have access to Kitt for the rest of your life; when Le Wagon update thier curriculum, you can access these exercises on Kitt. Their Alumni are also very active in many different sectors in countries all around the world. So you're not just purchasing the time to learn how to code when you enrol on Le Wagon, you're participating in a global community of entrepreneurs and designers and educators. Like I said, I only really have good things to say about it!