Fullstack Web Developer Bootcamp

Le Wagon is a coding bootcamp that started in Paris and now runs in cities around the world. The full-time web development course covers the whole stack in three months: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the front end, Ruby on Rails on the back end, SQL for the data, and Git for working as a team. It ends with a group project, taken from an idea to a working, deployed product.

I could already code when I joined. What I didn't have was a solid foundation underneath it. I'd picked things up piece by piece, enough to get something working, but not enough to execute on my own with confidence or to know why one approach was better than another. I wanted that foundation so I could build things myself, and so the solutions I designed could have more impact.

What stuck wasn't any one language. It was seeing how a product hangs together underneath the interface. A screen is a view on a data model. A button sends a request, something on the server decides what happens, and the answer comes back as new state. Once you've written the model, the routes, and the views yourself, you start reading designs that way too.

That has been the most useful part in my work as a product builder. It makes the cost of a decision visible earlier. I can tell when a small change in the interface implies a change to the model, and when a big-looking change is mostly presentation. Conversations with engineers move faster, because we're talking about the same objects.

It also changed what I can take on. I don't stop at a design and hand it over. I implement and push changes in production codebases, and I build my own projects out of interest, this site included.

Three months doesn't make anyone a senior engineer, and it didn't make me one. It gave me a foundation solid enough to keep learning on real products. That has turned out to matter more.