How to (finally) love your job: the story of Charly

Reflecting back on her previous position as a risk management consultant, Charlotte rapidly realized how much programming changed her life. Falling in love with coding after writing her very first line, this amazing problem-solver freelanced for a couple of months before joining Berlin-based FinTech Myos as a junior software engineer.

When I graduated from my Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, my first job was a risk manager at BMW. In my day-to-day missions, I started to recognize the great importance of programming and dealing with a huge amount of data. I started to ask around, and found friends who had previously attended Le Wagon. They were not only telling me about their amazing experience but also - now that they work as developers - enjoy their job and already look forward on Friday to come back to the office on Monday. How crazy is that?

A few months later, I passed through the doors of Le Wagon Tel Aviv and started my 9-week bootcamp in Batch #264.

As a business graduate, undertaking a career in software development is not always the most obvious way to go. Though, in my case joining a coding bootcamp has been the smartest move to fast-forward my career.

Learning how to code equipped me with strong problem-solving skills, and pimped up my business skillset with technical knowledge.

Coding is the perfect combination of building something very logical - I mean, it’s the computer - where you can include your creativity. You’re building a website or service or app which is actually going to be used by people. Also, you immediately see or can test what you’re working on, meaning you see the results, know if it’s running properly or not. It’s not a power point presentation for that you create slides as crazy, which is then, worst case, held by someone else and then ends up in the archive folder where no one has a look on it again.

The bootcamp itself was surprisingly intense, especially hitting the first weeks. One of my biggest challenges was understanding the main principles and connecting the dots. Other students always seemed faster in solving the challenges while I just stared at the screen, sometimes simply not understanding what I had to do. But after the first weeks, it really started to come together...

It's hard. But when you start getting it, it's where the magic happens.

Committing to a 9-week, intensive bootcamp program is a great achievement in itself, and it appears nothing worked better for me than an unwavering motivation. The problems that seemed insuperable in the first week turned out to become the least of my concerns once project weeks came, when we had to build an entire web application from scratch.

And guess what? We nailed it! By the end of the course, my 4-person team built Joyage, a trip-planner website for friends traveling from different destinations. According to different parameters such as trip duration, origins and budget, Joyage would find the top three destinations that fit all travelers’ requirements.

Working on my own tech project enabled me to gain valuable practical knowledge, as well as a strong product-driven approach. After finishing the bootcamp, I freelanced for a couple of months before joining Myos, a Berlin-based FinTech startup as a junior software engineer. In this new position, I mainly work on Ruby on Rails backend projects, and get the opportunity to broaden my skills while learning other languages. As a junior developer, I can dive deeper into a bunch of other projects written in Node.js, Typescript, React, GraphQL. They are basically languages we didn’t learn at Le Wagon, but which I am able to play with really easily.

In today’s changing world, any head hunter will tell you that adaptability is important.

For me, learning the process of how to tackle a problem empowered her to be adaptable. Le Wagon not only teaches skills to become a full stack developer, but also how to adopt a product-driven mindset. For example, I figured how important it is to understand the user stories of a specific project to know the final outcomes. The bootcamp taught me the basis of how to approach problems and ask for help should I need more expertise on a specific breaking point.

Those three months in Tel Aviv were a perfect combination of learning something new every day while enjoying an amazing city with beautiful vibes, the most friendly and open people, cool events and incredible sunsets at the beach!

Le Wagon made me confident about what I'm capable of.

My experience at Le Wagon was a game changer, not only to fast-forward my career, but also as a pulse to achieve her goals. Since then, it’s been a steady learning process for which the challenges over the course of the bootcamp have been a good preparation.