An ex-Shopee PM’s Honest Review of Le Wagon Singapore’s 9-week Coding Bootcamp

Hi folks, it’s been about a month since my 9-week full-time full-stack coding bootcamp with Le Wagon Singapore has ended. Thus, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the experience for folks curious or wondering whether they should embark on this journey some time in their lives as well 😉 FYI it will all be in structured bullet points for other OCD ex-consultants out there.

Background & Motivations

• Prior to joining, I was a product manager in Shopee/Seamoney for 3 years. Had always felt inadequately prepared to take on more technical tasks like opining on required API fields, microservices architectures and debugging API JSON replies
• Had taken one Intro to Python course in college but couldn’t quite make the mental connection on going from “executing code in my black ugly terminal” to “making a pretty website” (I later learned that there are many uses for coding, and web development is just one of them, e.g. data science is another)
• Had desires to “start-up” after the bootcamp, so thought learning to code would be useful for either building my own MVP or being better at hiring developers (at least at the early stages without a CTO to help me)

Initial Expectations

• Going to be kinda intense (but I would handle it as it comes…)
• Lectures for half a day then coding for the other half (in reality it was more like a 20/80 split)