Hired as back-end developer at only 18

A year before the bootcamp, I worked as an apprentice in a travel agency working with management and office matters. I was 16 at the time. When I turned 17, I decided to enroll in IT System 2 years program in a College in São Paulo.

While I was looking for an internship, I ended up discovering Le Wagon through one of their meetups on Ruby, I was curious and went. Loved the pedagogy and atmosphere, completely different from the one I was experiencing in class...

I took the plunge and decided to take the opportunity of my holidays to participate in their first bootcamp in Brazil.

From the start the way they teach got me hooked. It was completely different from the traditional teaching method of my University. No grades, full autonomy and lots of practice during the day, incentivized collaboration with other students and the format brought people from very different backgrounds and ages (my batch had an oceanographer, a lawyer, people from France, South Africa and Australia…) but with a very important common factor which was their motivation to learn together.

The overall atmosphere was a mix of extreme focus and attention (you don’t want to lose time in 45 days) with a cool, easygoing way of interacting with teachers and other students.

My bootcamp ended on the 3rd of September and on the 3rd of October I got hired. I saw a position at a Brazilian fintech startup called Vindi. They called me, I had to explain how could I pretend knowing stuff for a job I did not know 3 months before…

But being founded by two self-taught programers, they looked at my github profile (with lots of projects done during the bootcamp) and gave me a chance to pass a test. I killed it and got the job. I was 18. The project I was hired for was actually a new startup inside the startup and I have been coding the first version of it since day 1. We’ve built an API to let companies in Brazil easily transmit oficial invoices to more than 1000 municipalities in one single app, the company is called FastNotas.

I kept learning a lot of course and still go back to Le Wagon’s platform or alumni slack community whenever I need help or a reminder on a specific subject. I dropped out of the University by the way. Too impatient to learn in real life :)

For whoever wants or needs to enter the job market soon. For anyone interested to launch, or join a digital startup. For anyone who intends to interact with coders in his projects and needs to be able to understand their logic and assess them.