Meet our Full-stack Web Lead Instructor Xun, a creative programmer

"Learning and majoring Mathematics is more like...training my perseverance"

For every program we launch, Le Wagon aim to gather a teaching crew of the best subject matter experts in research, freelancing, corporate and education. We are grateful and excited to have a many professionals with different backgrounds joining us. Meet today's instructor Xun! She pursued mathematics studies in a women's liberal arts college in suburban Philadelphia. Just studying fundemental science, I think everyone can already imagine, is not a very simple thing to do. When we asked her what you have learned during the four years of studying in the mathematics department, she said: "It may be that it has trained my perseverance.”

“It is the process of not giving up when encountering difficulties, solving them gradually and learning new things along the way."

I want to learn new things, and to be able to build something. Then, if you ask me why do I decide to learn to code instead of learn to build a building, the answer is: I may actually learn to build a building given the chance.

Because the courses at Le Wagon are product-oriented, meaning you can build a real product after the 9-week courses.

Le Wagon coding bootcamp has a reputation in the industry and its course info are easily accessible on the Internet. The reviews are also good from the students. 

I enjoy learning and growing, and being able to be good at something after practicing. I want to be a life-long learner. Web development is a field that constantly updates, evolves, just like the softwares in your phone, so you have to keep up to the trend, and keep an open mind to new things. I get challenged and learn new things every time I work. It isn’t always pleasant of course, but when you make it work, I get that “developer’s high”.

Once upon a time, I built an alarm clock that requires the user to play a game to stop it. Oh I didn’t build the software, I only did the interaction design. I got a patent for that, which I still brag about from time to time(like right now) even though it’s been 5 years.

I learned Ruby with Le Wagon, and it introduced me to the software development industry. However,  my first programming experience is with Wolfram Language in Mathematica. I remember years ago, in college, trying to find a big prime number with Mathematica for a number theory class, the program’s while loop just didn’t break and it crashed my laptop. Then, all my work on my laptop was gone. It was very traumatic. 

I don’t remember anymore how to use Wolfram Language, but what I do remember is that there are a lot of symbols and the lines were long even to achieve the simplest tasks.

Ruby is a programming language that focuses on programmer happiness. It’s elegant compared to a lot of other programming languages. For example, to print “hello world” in C and Ruby:

in C, it's like

In ruby, it’s just:

p “Hello world”

Meanwhile it’s powerful. It also comes with the efficient web development framework Ruby on Rails, that makes building an application in a few hours possible. Ruby may seem to be a rather indie programming language, but the community is very active and supportive. I enjoy being a part of the Ruby community.

First of all, teaching itself is a very rewarding experience. Being able to share something you are into and see them build cool things with it brings me a lot of joy and inspires me.  When I started teaching with Le Wagon part-time, and when students asked me why, I realized it’s important to put things to words. In efforts to explain things properly, I started to really dive into the basics of basics, trying  to figure out why we learn certain frameworks, trying to understand each line of code at the core.  In teaching, I learn more than I had imaged.

The platforms that students use to learn at Le Wagon are developed by the Le Wagon instructors all over the world. Being able to contribute to this powerful application and collaborating with these amazing developers around the world is something I’ve always wanted to do. “Change your life. Learn to code.” Yes, it is a marketing slogan. No, it doesn’t apply to everyone. But to me, Le Wagon is actually life changing. It introduced me to Ruby, to this supportive community, to the web development industry so I get to do something I mostly enjoy. So, why wouldn’t I join?