Coding bootcamp in Berlin

I am an American, and because of this many people have asked me why I chose Le Wagon. The answer for the choice is simple -- a friend with impeccable education credentials and an overall bad ass told me she felt "Le Wagon was the best education experience you might ever have". Here I am roughly one month after graduating the program and I concur with what my friend said. Overall the experience in Berlin was unforgettable and was really an on-ramp to a new way of life for me. After getting my MBA I worked at a renowned management consulting firm for 6+ years and worked heavily on systems and applications in the role of a product and project manager. I'd always felt vulnerability not being able to understand the back end or intelligently question my technical team members. I also had put a number of my entrepreneurial ideas on hold simply because I didn't know how to start. Le Wagon has changed both of these weaknesses for me and I feel newly empowered as a professional and a person.

The curriculum is fantastic. Le Wagon runs their education much like a software product. They design, build, test, and refine ensuring that their education is current and continually optimized for the students. The first half of the bootcamp is intense. If feels like your brain is being shredded, you feel vulnerable, and question whether you can actually get it. Because the program is so well designed there are points where all of the things you did in the previous days suddenly make sense and you are able to start building your ideas. It is a grand feeling, and by the end while you will not be a top notch developer, you are equipped with the tools to keep at it and keep improving so that you can be if you so choose to take that path.

Beyond the education Le Wagon creates an amazing community and you form a family with the people you attend with and learn from. I had so much fun over the course of the program and made friendships that I know will last a lifetime.

Finally, I like the honesty of Le Wagon, they say it is for helping creative people learn how to code. There are no false promises about what employment you will get, or what super power you will acquire. It is known that what you are acquiring is the skill and knowledge to put you on a new trajectory if you have what it takes. As far as job support, as of this review there was no formal program, but in lieu of that there is an extremely supportive network of +2,000 alumni and very involved teachers that will help you as much as they can.

I unhesitatingly recommend Le Wagon to anybody that wants to change their career path or improve their knowledge about technology. It is a great value for the money and an amazing experience that will empower you in the end. Thanks Le Wagon!

Attending the 9-week coding bootcamp at Le Wagon Berlin was one of the best decisions I ever made because it changed my life. With a background in journalism and cultural analysis, I had no prior knowledge of coding. However, I wanted to change my career path and become a web developer. So when I stumbled across Le Wagon, I first went to all of the free workshops they offered and spoke to staff and alumni and then decided to join myself. The programme is very tough (hence bootcamp) but the curriculum is really well structured. You start by learning the basics of Ruby, HTML, CSS and JavaScript before moving onto the Rails framework. In the last three weeks, you build two projects in groups and present your final project at a demo day.

I didn't believe it was possible to learn coding in such a short amount of time, but it is amazing to see what you are able to learn when you commit time and passion to it and have competent people to guide you. The teacher at Le Wagon do an incredible job teaching the complexity of web development to absolute beginners and I have experienced them to be always helpful, patient and encouraging.

Apart from the technical aspects, le Wagon has an amazing community. Our driver, Philipp, and our main teacher, Alice, organised a lot of evening activities and also workshops or talks to introduce us to the Berlin start-up scene. I also became really good friends with the people in my batch as well as the teachers and TAs and everyone was motivating and encouraging each other. Even though the programme was tough, I loved being there to learn coding. I am now pursuing my career as a frontend web developer and will never forget the unforgettable time and fun I had at le Wagon. Thank you for everything!

I never really had the courage to actually get behind a computer and start learning coding all by myself. I thought that would be super complicated and I wouldn't be able to comprehend anything. I started to search for schools that teach me all of this in the best way possible.

The best approach for me to learn something is "learning by doing", so I searched for something doing just that. A bootcamp would've been ideal and so my journey started. I decided to take part in the 9-week coding Bootcamp of Le Wagon.

I must say, at this point, it was the best decision I could've made.

Just right from the first day everybody was very friendly. First thing in the morning was a lecture giving us students the knowledge we needed for the day. Most of the day we spent with coding together with another student (always someone else). During this time you had very friendly and capable teachers by your side and no matter the problem, they took their time to explain it, giving the optimal support to learn something completely new. In the evening all students came together again and started the live code. In it we all worked together on an exercise . This created a very nice and comfortable atmosphere.

During the last two weeks we worked on projects. The projects themselves are created from scratch and based on everything taught during the bootcamp. Le Wagon provided us with the skills and the mindset shaping us into real web developers and with this knowledge we created some really amazing things.

Le Wagon is undoubtedly an unforgettable experience and it also brings people from all over the world together.

I can recommend Le Wagon without hesitation. They will teach you to code, for sure, but more than that, after nine weeks you will exit the course with the energy, ideas, relationships and skills to take your ideas to the next level. I considered all the leading coding bootcamp programs in Europe and the USA, and I chose Le Wagon specifically for the entrepreneurial mindset and dynamic culture. I felt the course delivered on all of my expectations, and exceeded them in many ways.

Pros: fast-paced, high teacher quality, entrepreneurial mindset, robust online curriculum. Cons: honestly, I can't really isolate any.

My background was perhaps a little unusual for my batch. I was older than most (46) and was founder/ceo of a few technology companies. I was interested in returning to the code after many years, and to immerse myself in a new challenge. Still, I felt right at home and was able to learn a ton and contribute some as well.

If you are considering a software bootcamp, my recommendation is to go for it. You won't be disappointed, and it may very well be pivotal in your life. If you are willing to give it 100%, you are sure to succeed. Choosing which bootcamp is a personal decision. If you want to find a job as a developer, Le Wagon will prepare you as will many of the other quality camps. If you want to, immediately or eventually, develop a new product, build your own company, pursue an idea... then I think it's no contest -- Le Wagon is really the only bootcamp catering to this kind of creative+technical competence. Go for it, you will be in good company, and you will be very happy you did.

I joined Le Wagon Berlin in July 2017 after having finished my Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering with a specialization in mechanical engineering. Having worked as an intern in big industrial companies I realized I'd rather prefer working in a more entrepreneurial company or start-up. At the same time I recognized that pure mechanical engineers probably won’t be as much in demand as before due to growing digitalization. Being able to handle interfaces especially to IT is one of the important key capabilities for future engineers. I was evaluating two coding bootcamps in Berlin and decided for Le Wagon, because of three reasons:

1) They already taught over 90 batches, which means over the time and with all the experience they must have optimized their program and lessons to a high quality level.

2) Ruby is a stable programming language.

3) Really good price and time frame.

In the end my expectations were even exceeded. The teachers were amazingly motivating and competent, I met interesting people from different professional backgrounds, and the exercises enable a step-by-step learning process. All in all you really learn a lot of web developing capabilities within a short amount of time. I fell in love with Ruby because the programming language is really easy to learn for beginners, the logic behind it is easy to grasp and when you’re able to manage one programming language very well you can learn other languages very quickly. I will start a job as junior developer in a few weeks and during the interview I managed to solve a coding challenge which convinced my interviewer, who was even surprised that I implemented it that well, to hire me. He expected a more basic solution after only learning coding for 9 weeks, because I literally started with zero knowledge before Le Wagon. I guess that speaks for the teaching quality.

I joined le Wagon Berlin 6 months ago. In retrospect, I’m fortunate to claim that it has been one of the best decision I have ever taken.

For the context:

We had just launched our startup and recently acquired market confirmation. We needed to scale up and therefore, update our MVP. Our original goal was for one of us to do the course in order to gain enough skills to be able to hire a CTO and/or manage a dev team.

The bootcamp:

You start learning the fundamentals of programming, moving onto front-end and design, wrap-it-up with Rails, the framework that puts everything together and finish up with 3 weeks of concrete project development. The starting weeks are intense but teachers are very dedicated to making sure you’re not left behind. However, you need to be fully committed to succeed and take the most out of it. It’s emotional payback time during the final project weeks when you figure out that you can build an entire web application from scratch when, 1.5 months ago, you thought that Java was an abbreviation for Javascript.

After the bootcamp:

I figured out I really liked to code and decided to build our new product. With the skills acquired you’re able to tackle all of it: Conception, design, development, server setup, testing, rolling out and maintenance. At that point, Le Wagon had further proven its value with its great community as I was always able to reach out to teachers and ask for advice.

To wrap-it-up, here are some of the key aspects you gain after completing le Wagon:

- Have an idea? Just build, launch and scale it! Ruby on Rails is very powerful to launch products very fast

- More than just coding: Get notions of product management, design and UX, all set in a business perspective

- Understand developers and learn to communicate effectively with them

- Once you understand the fundamentals of programming, it’s easier to branch out to other languages

- You’re part of a growing and very supportive community

- Have access to great and constantly updated resources/learning material

Side-note: For those worried about the perception that coding is for geeks, math enthusiasts etc. please put those thoughts aside, those are complete bullshit. Do yourself some good: Get enrolled, struggle first and succeed at last. You will learn very powerful and actionable skills in a very short amount of time while behind around great people.