At Le Wagon, graduation isn’t the end of the story. It’s often when the real building begins.
Our alumni keep turning ideas from their bootcamp projects into fun side projects, useful products, and even businesses of their own. And while we don’t teach native mobile development, they’ve gone beyond the bootcamp stack to build native mobile apps.
Leandro, batch #2123
Freelance Full-Stack Developer
Friends visiting Tokyo would always ask me about these viral TikToks of bizarre vending machines, but there was nowhere reliable to actually go find them. The info was scattered in comments or on old Japanese blogs with just a photo and no address, so half the time you’d never track the machine down, or it had already disappeared.
I pitched the idea for my final project at Le Wagon but purposely held off building it there so I could do it properly afterward, together with my classmate Matias.
It’s basically a Pokémon Go for vending machines.
Jidou Navi is a crowdsourced map where people can find rare or interesting machines nearby, check in, take photos, and earn XP and badges.
The community also helps keep it accurate. People can confirm that a machine is still there or flag it if it’s gone, so the map doesn’t end up pointing you to something that vanished months ago.
Even if you don’t care about the gamification side, it’s a great way to track down the exact machine you saw on social media.
It features locations both online and in person around Tokyo, Saitama, and Kanagawa.
I built it with React Native + Expo for mobile, Mapbox for the map, and Supabase for the backend. I leaned a lot on AI-assisted development along the way while still understanding what we were building.
The Expo + Mapbox combo gave us more headaches than expected.
Justin, batch #1638
Senior Software Engineer at Kotoba Technologies
My mom is 70 now and she’s frequently filling out long health forms for her and my step dad, even on her iPhone, and it’s super tedious.
I wanted a way for her to fill out web forms automatically, so I made Ume.
Ume is a Safari extension for macOS and iOS that automatically fills out forms.
I don’t fill out forms too often, maybe one every two weeks, but this is handy when I do.
I used AI coding tools heavily, but it’s a native macOS app and Safari extension, written in Swift. It uses your choice of AI provider but never sends your saved form answers to that provider.
It’s a free app and it’s open source.
Esteban Lopez, batch #1808
Founder & Product Lead
The idea for GoGaijin actually traces back to a moment years before I ever moved to Japan.
I was teaching English in Korea, on a guided tour in China with a Korean group, when a fellow passenger handed me a date wrapped in cellophane from a street vendor. I ate it, and within minutes I was coughing violently: food poisoning, with no way to communicate in Chinese or Korean, just me begging in English to be taken back to the hotel.
The answer was no: stick it out until the tour group returned that evening.
I’ve never forgotten that feeling of being sick, stranded, and completely unable to make myself understood.
That’s really the seed GoGaijin grew from.
I built it so that other people living or traveling abroad would never have to go through what I did that day: verified, English-friendly services across healthcare, housing, legal support, and daily life, so people can actually feel at home here instead of just getting by.
I built the app myself months later after finishing Le Wagon with React Native with Expo, Firebase and Cloud Run on the backend, Supabase running the admin side, and along the way I taught myself to wire in AI through Google Vertex AI.
What started as a portfolio project turned into my company, LopezLabs KK.
And GoGaijin is now live on both iOS and Android, with paying customers.
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