Alice Palussière spent years investigating stories, but there was always a barrier between her and the information she needed. She knew how to ask the right questions, just not how to extract the data that would answer them.
As a journalist specialising in investigations, she’d mastered the traditional tools: camera, audio, interviews. But the digital toolkit? That remained a mystery.
“I wanted to understand how the web actually works,” Alice says. “Not just use it, but really get inside it.”
She chose Le Wagon’s Software Web Development bootcamp partly because the maths seemed less intimidating than the data science track. But mostly because she was curious about building things, about understanding architecture and structure.
The first day was setup day. Bugs everywhere, configurations to troubleshoot, a terminal window that looked like alien script. But Le Wagon’s teachers don’t just fix problems for you, they walk you through solving them yourself. Once her machine was configured, Alice had a baseline that’s stayed with her ever since.
“That terminal became my magic tool,” she recalls. “They took me by the hand and showed me what I could do with it.”
The Web Development bootcamp taught her Ruby, though she’s since shifted to Python for work. But the real lesson wasn’t about any specific language. It was about learning how to learn, how to structure queries, how to automate tasks that used to eat up hours.
“I can go back to the slides anytime I’m stuck,” Alice explains. “That background knowledge makes me autonomous. I’m not dependent on someone else to solve my problems.”
She learned to organise her data collection, to reduce human error, to ask better questions of the systems she was investigating. All of which made her a sharper journalist.
The final exam stands out in her memory. The whole cohort gathered at someone’s flat, everyone working on different problems but united in the same goal. The energy was intense, but also supportive.
Le Wagon deliberately keeps batch sizes manageable, around 20-30 people per cohort. Small enough that you know everyone’s name, big enough that you get diverse perspectives on every problem.
“We’d all worked hard to get there,” Alice says. “The point was for everyone to succeed, not just to pass an exam.”
There’s a before and after to her relationship with technology now. She’s not just a user anymore. She’s someone who understands what’s happening behind the interface.
“It’s an individual adventure, but you do it together,” Alice reflects. “You realise everyone can do this. It’s not as complex as it seems once someone shows you the way.”
The Web Development bootcamp gave her Ruby as a foundation, the Latin of programming languages. From there, she could branch into Python, into JavaScript, into whatever she needed.
“Once you understand the structure, the specific language matters less,” she says. “You know how to interact, how to pose questions, how to set conditions.”
Alice still teaches, and now she has better answers for her students when they ask how the web works. Le Wagon gave her permanent access to course materials, so when she needs to refresh a concept or dive deeper, the resources are still there.
She’s levelled up, not just in technical skill, but in confidence.
Software and AI Full-Time (9 weeks)
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