Coding bootcamp in Barcelona

I’ve done lots of fun things with great people, and I’ve studied in a lot of places, but never have I experienced something that was such a great experience and taught me so much in such a short time.

My experience at Le Wagon, Batch #57 (Barcelona) was worth every penny, no question. I can’t imagine having a better learning environment with more supportive and knowledgeable staff and diverse and interesting classmates. We had people from all over—the US, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Ireland, and of course a few Spanish locals.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the bootcamp was spent indoors, but what can I say? It’s hard not to love studying in a place like Barcelona. Being in such a beautiful setting really boosted my experience. I mean, I got to walk past La Sagrada Familia every day on my way to class. If you’re a Barcelona native you probably try to look the other way, but I think I hurt my neck looking up so many times. The coworking space we were in was modern and well equipped. There were some minor issues with Wi-Fi on occasion, but I believe those have been fixed, and I think the batch is actually in the process of moving to a different space.

The leadership really made the experience. I can’t imagine having better instructors and TA’s than the ones we had in Batch #57. Our lead instructor was an incredibly humble and personable guy who carried us through each lesson with a sense of humor and an approach that was laid-back while taking his role quite seriously. Since he was the lead instructor, he gets his own sentence here, but I can say that the other instructors and the TAs were also very knowledgeable, encouraging and enjoyable to learn from. I’m still in touch with several of them!

As far as the technical expertise of the instructors, I never once doubted their qualification to be teaching us. They really seemed to know above and beyond the stuff they were teaching us, and had an immediate answer for almost every question that was thrown at them. There was always the sense that the instructors wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page and that no one got left behind. For those who struggled, the leadership did a great job of giving them extra help while balancing their commitment to the rest of the class.

Everything was well-organized and there were never any logistical issues that I noticed. This is in contrast to some horror stories I’ve heard about certain bootcamps stateside. From the Driver, instructors and TAs there was no snark, there were no walls up, everyone was receptive and communicative, and took their position seriously.

To the guys doing hiring at Le Wagon: keep up that good work! You’ve impressed me.

I’d been teaching myself web development for a couple years prior to my attendance, but Le Wagon really enabled me to bring it all together and gain the confidence I needed to know that I was in this game for the long term. During the 7th week, my small group was able to quickly bootstrap a robust Rails app with several pages and a fully functional UI and back end. And during the final two weeks, we put together a much more functional app that made the first one look like child’s play. Our final presentation was made a success thanks to the coaching and technical help from our Driver and couple of the TA’s who gave us feedback during our presentation rehearsal.

Upon returning to the US, I quickly found a part-time remote position working for a startup that’s basing their SAAS product on Rails and AngularJS, and am currently negotiating with several contacts at local companies for a full time position. As of writing this review, it’s been about 80 days since the program ended. To add to that, I made some great friends and acquaintances during our extracurricular activities (hiking Montserrat, going out for drinks, getting daily lunches). My classmates were the type of people that like to get things done: intelligent, personable, mature. I truly enjoyed having the classmates I did.

When I first came across on Le Wagon website the first thing caught my attention was their slogan: “Change your life: learn to code”. I thought this was exactly what I wanted, change my life, jump in another “adventure”.

After my 4 years in China and almost 1 in Cambodia working as a Project manager in the garment business, I wanted to go back to Europe and start again a new career. Cause my IT background and cause ,as Project Manager, I always worked with developers I decided that the best way to go back in the market was to polish off my coding skills, which I was not touching since the university times. To me coding always been something boring to do. I remember at the university studying C or Pascal was a torture, thats why I decided to follow the networking path and avoid code.

But since today the world need coders I decided to give it a second opportunity and study it again in some cool course all around Europe.. and boom! That is exactly when I came across Le Wagon. I made my decision in one night.. “if it’s cool as it look like then I have found the right course for me”.

I signed in the day after. The first available batch was in Barcelona (beautiful city!) I called them, I did my interview and finally ,after few days, I got the confirmation: I was in! After a wait of almost 1 month, here I was , learning code in a beautiful city like Barcelona, and yes, everything was like I expected It was, absolutely fantastic.

All teachers and people from Le Wagon they were not just teachers but they were and are great human beings, taught me how to code and how to love it, they transmit me their passion and their will to keep going and to learn something new everyday. And right now I just can’t stop! I do code everyday and I am hungry of learning more and more, knowing that now I am part of an amazing community that is there anytime I will need help. Thanks Le Wagon for this great experience, you really changed my life.

If you can see from the other reviews, Le Wagon gets high marks as a programming bootcamp. It has a well-designed, rigorous curriculum that does a great job starting you at A (almost no knowledge of programming) and getting you to Z (being an autonomous developer that can build applications). The teachers and TAs were knowledgeable, supportive and great teachers. The bootcamp is absolutely worth the price. It has made me an autonomous software developer, which is exactly what I was looking for - of course, I have plenty more to learn but I have no problem digging into documentation that would've intimidated me before.

About Barcelona in particular, I couldn't have made a better choice of location. Seriously, if you decide to go with Le Wagon, do it in Barcelona. The batch had an amazing group of people that you rarely find in one place - different nationalities who had all lived abroad and developed the open-mindedness and maturity that comes with that. When the bootcamp ended, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we experienced "Le Wagon withdrawal". This was not linked to the program and curriculum (as great as it was) but the sense of community that developed during the Barcelona batch.

After 3 years working in Paris as a consultant, among which the past 2 years at eleven, a strategy and management firm specialized in digital strategy (http://eleven-strategy.com/en/) , I’ve decided to take a deeper step “behind the digital scenes”. This gradual slide stems from several opportunities that made me aware of the need to enhance my tech skills, in particular through my latest assignment as a consultant. I worked as a project manager for a cross-functional cross-country flagship project that was meant to diversify the earn and burn opportunities in the loyalty program of a major player in the hospitality industry through e-commerce. I could only be relevant and meet the ambitious objectives of the project if I effectively managed to challenge each team and external provider that I was coordinating. While, based on my previous experience, I could easily take a deep-dive into the stakes of most of the aspects of the project (marketing, finance, legal, tax, etc.), I still needed to fully grasp the challenges the multiple IT teams were facing. I thus applied to do an intense 9 weeks coding training at Le Wagon Barcelona, which allowed me to gain technical skills in both back-end and front-end programming languages and experience the work of a fullstack developer.

Le Wagon … the very name holds the promise of a singular journey, right? Now, let me tell you a bit me about how this journey felt. I remember the first Monday, when we went around the table to listen to the story of each of the 14 individuals gathered, aging from 17 to 35+, all with a very diverse cultural professional and personal background (investor, former consultants, freelancers, “proven” and aspiring entrepreneurs) … Some people had previous technical experience and most did not. At the very beginning, I thought: “Great, it very much feels like a retreat for cosmopolitan and ambitious yuppies…”. And then, as we moved on with the set-up of our computers and I discussed more thoroughly with each one, I realized how much it would be a challenging and humbling collective learning experience. And that’s exactly what it was.

On this first day at Le Wagon, I shared my first coffee of the journey (and there were many more) with my then buddy-for-the-day, Hugh Mitton, and we chatted about travels, previous work experiences, movie making and other activities. 9 weeks later, after 10 days of intense coding and debugging, we’ve introduced the MVP of Destinosé (www.destinose.com) , a travel app meant to help people that like perusing the world pick their next destination.

Working each day with a new buddy as per Le Wagon methodology, doing about 8-10h of problem-solving on cases that did NOT look like business cases for which I could use what I had learnt to do so far was quite challenging. It obviously gave me a renewed and thrilling feeling of being totally out of my comfort zone … everyday!

As much as it could also feel a little bit frustrating to learn a new set of coding elements everyday without having the comfort of thinking you’ve fully digested the tricks of the previous day, I realized that these layers came together in a very “neuroergonomic” way after I was done with the bootcamp. It is rather impressive to see how well designed this immersion into the vast world of coding is. The material itself (kitt and karr platforms) encompasses the best practices of coding in a very accessible and readable manner. The TAs that are taking turns into teaching parts of the curriculum are all fully committed to deliver digest explanations given the fast-paced learning curve that’s proposed. They are also keen on spending extra-time with students to make sure they feel fully on track. The whole pedagogical team is smoothly coordinated by a very inspiring driver, Gustavo De Vita, whom I feel incarnates really well the very concept of equanimity applied to management. Le Wagon Barcelona is also well connected to the tech startup scene there, which allowed us to meet a lot of interesting entrepreneurs and try their product/service (e.g. founders of GetYourHero, Eoz, Yugo, etc.).

Slowly, I started making programming related puns and speaking in Spanglish over lunch preparation with my teammates. And yes, we did prepare lunch together everyday, shared it at the terrace of the coworking space, with a sunny view on La Sagrada Familia! Some days, knowing we had to get through a very heavy workload, we would start with a xocolata a la tassa and churros. At the end of the day, when backs were hurting too much for having kept ourselves behind the screens for the whole day, we could enjoy a good Kundalini yoga class at a school around the corner or a tailored session put in place by the staff of Le Wagon Barcelona.