On 17 October, five young unemployed people from Brussels left for the Le Wagon coding bootcamp (9 weeks of intensive coding training). At the end of the fourth week, let’s see how it all went.
These five youngsters with limited financial resources were able to take part in this training course under the
Smart City Scholarships granted by the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region (State Secretary Bianca Debaets). The purpose of this new initiative was to give these young people an opportunity to re-enter the labour market from the top.
Highly motivated and amazingly talented, the 5 young students where joined by 30 other students from all over the world, all of them also determined to learn how to develop their own applications. At the end of the fourth week, let’s see how it all went:
- It was a tough beginning for all the participants, but the therapeutic effect of group learning and the extra-bootcamp activities soon rebooted the troops’ morale!
- The participants were able to talk with a number of inspiring players on the tech and entrepreneurial scene such as Xavier Damman, Laurent Hublet, Ramon Suarez as well as with alumni of previous Le Wagon courses.
- The five award-winners have already learned to handle the basic concepts of algorithmic logic using Ruby (the basic bricks out of which all programming languages are made), version-control tools, command lines from Terminal, object-oriented programming (OOP) and have even begun to explore front-end languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to make their user interfaces both intuitive and interactive.
The pace is gruelling but our five scholarship students are still there and more involved than ever. Six weeks from Demo Day, this is a great sign!
To be continued...
