From Business School grad to full-stack developer

After graduating from ESCP Europe, Alice enrolled with Le Wagon’s 6th batch, in January 2015. She then worked one month as a freelancer, joined Save — one of the most promising French startups — as backend Rails developer, and ultimately joined Le Wagon’s team as a lead teacher and developer. Quite a journey!

After spending one year in Berlin, working for a digital start-up, I realized my technical background was too light to keep on working for tech companies and get cool job offers. For me, learning to code was a pre-requisite to really have an interesting profile. At that time, I didn’t have much time to start all over and learn on my own. Le Wagon’s bootcamp was perfectly fitting my needs: a product-oriented bootcamp with no compromise on coding best practices.

I was searching for European coding schools on the internet and Le Wagon popped up first (thanks to good SEO practice :)). Of course, I then investigated a bit and discussed with former students. They just confirmed the opinion I had by looking at their website, reviews, demo days on Youtube, and by reading their curriculum.

The learning pace is very fast! From the very beginning until the end, it's intensive and challenging. Sometimes, it feels like you haven't completely "digested" one learning block but you have to move on to the next one. But then, the structure of the program is really smart, and based on repeating concepts week after week. So if you stay motivated and enthusiastic, you end up getting the big picture.

When I joined Save as junior backend developer after the program, I realised that my knowledge of code was deep enough to be productive and efficient even in a team of experienced developers. Of course, I was not an expert in Algorithmics, bash scripts, or noSQL databases. But thanks to hard work and experienced mentors, I learned very fast, being already familiarized with important software engineering concepts and coding best practices after Le Wagon.

The rest are details you'll get back to, and remember: as a developer you're part of a strong open-source community, you're never alone with your problems.

I did the bootcamp of Le Wagon in 2015, in Paris, at the very beginning of the company. I got to know Boris, Sebastien and Romain. The skills and values they were teaching us immediately fitted with my own vision of what makes a good company culture. They focus on the learning path of their employees, give them a lot of flexibility in a global environment of trust and transparency. Since June 2017, I am helping Philipp, the city driver of Berlin, developing the bootcamp in this crazy city. When I am not teaching, I am programming new features for our internal platforms and tools. I have a large spectrum of tasks and I enjoy this diversity in my job.

People. As of today, more than 2,600 people from everywhere in the world did Le Wagon. It’s a very friendly and open-minded community. Only in our January 2018 Berlin batch, we had 12 different nationalities for 22 people, all interesting personalities. Teaching is also very rewarding: sharing knowledge and seeing people growing their tech skills makes me happy. My only concern is the poor amount of women generally interested into coding: I’d like to see more girls in our batches, the opportunities are huge! Flexibility is an important criteria: my schedule is changing all the time, I am travelling a lot and I like this freedom. We often work remotely, from different places, which challenges coordination but we solve it mainly writing each other on Slack. It could not think of switching more traditional 8 to 5 job!

Not only Le Wagon is giving you good coding skills, relying on stable technologies, but I also love their teaching approach: you learn and work as a group, and the more you try to help each other, the more you understand code. Their teachers are amazing, their community is amazing. And it's a community you belong to for life!