I am Alexis Philippart de Foy, Co-founder, and CTO at
Smovin. I used to work as a Civil Engineer at Besix, a Belgian construction company present around the world. After three years of working on interesting projects, I decided that I wanted to start my own business. Knowing the importance of having a digital skillset, Le Wagon seemed to be the perfect first step towards achieving this goal!
As an alumni yourself, how was your Le Wagon experience?
I was hooked right away when starting my Le Wagon experience. Indeed, the program is well built and offers some challenging problems adapted to every student. It is built in such a way that you are not realising you are learning till the day you look back at your experience at Le Wagon (it goes by too fast by the way) and you see the things you learned and how they all clicked together perfectly.
On top of the learning experience, I also had the opportunity to meet some incredibly interesting and friendly people. We had a very good time during the coding hours but also after that when we all met for the afterwork drinks!
How did it help you get where you are now - co-founder and CTO of Smovin?
I see Le Wagon as the perfect stopping point to acquire the foundations in order to become active in the digital field. Whether you want to become a Product Manager, a Developer or a Founder, it gives you a good understanding of how web development works and how a team of developers collaborates together in order to build a product.
After graduating from Le Wagon, feeling that I still needed some additional experience before starting my own business, I started working at Seraphin (another Le Wagon alumni founded start-up) as a full stack developer in order to continue my coding journey. At some point, I felt confident enough to join Smovin as a Co-Founder and only developer. Now we are a team of 6 developers, some of them are also Le Wagon alumni!
What is Smovin? What kind of services do you offer?
Smovin is the go-to solution for real estate investors in need to simplify their real estate management-related tasks. We propose a web app where those investors can manage their real estate assets. Simplicity is at the core of everything we do! We try to make complex tasks simple to understand for our users in order for them to make decisions quickly and act on them in the blink of an eye. On top of quick decision-making, Smovin is also the right spot to centralise all information and documents related to real estate management.
You now have several Le Wagon alumni as part of your tech team. Why hire Le Wagon alumni? What skills are you looking for when hiring developers and what are you looking at?
Indeed, several Le Wagon alumni have worked or are still working at Smovin. When looking at a new hire, we are searching for someone with the ability to learn fast in order for them to get up to speed quickly. We are also assessing their capacity to be independent and find solutions on their own. At Le Wagon, this is exactly what students need to do in order to progress with the exercises and projects they are faced with.
What makes our graduates a good fit for any tech team?
Le Wagon is a short but intense program that forces students to be autonomous when working with code. On top of that, they experience working with other developers. This gives them a first experience working as a team, which is often a very challenging part of working in a tech team. In addition to the basic hard skills in order to become a developer, Le Wagon allows its alumni to gain a set of soft skills required to work in any tech team.
"Le Wagon graduates have the ability to learn new skills very fast. This is indeed what they demonstrate on a daily basis going through the bootcamp. This is very reassuring for companies looking to hire Le Wagon alumni as this is an essential quality in order to join a team and adapt to the technology stack of the company quickly."
A piece of advice to start a career in tech?
Never stop learning and continue coding whenever you can. Having a side project where you can improve your coding skills is a great way to continue learning. Collaborating on open source projects is another great way to not only improve the coding hard skills but also their soft skills working with other developers.
Want to know more about our graduates' experiences at Smovin?
- Have a look at Eva's story, from working in communication to becoming a full-stack developer at Smovin.
- Listen to Marie's journey, now a full-stack developer at Smovin.
And you can also download our
Student Jobs Report to learn about the career opportunities of our graduates!
