I’m Peter Pan holding your hand. Come on, Wendy! Second star to the right and on till morning.

Third week at Le Wagon, this means 1/3 in! I cannot say I’m all comfortable now, still trying to hold on to the speed of the Wagon, but some reassurance from different sources made me feel… normal.

…600 former students have struggled on the 3 first weeks of the Full Stack program. You cover in 3 weeks what computer science students see in 1 year. It cannot go without some pain 😅

@papillard (co-founder, CEO and official LW mascot)

The buddy system used at Le Wagon has been crucial for facing the biggest struggling days. It’s not obvious and immediate, for some of the students which this is the first intensive contact with coding, so the collaboration with those students to whom this has been really a piece of cake, it’s crucial! It’s maybe the determinant aspect of your experience. We’re not alone, and we’re here to cross the bridge together, some ahead, some holding on to the back of the Wagon, but we’re all in! We’re transporting ourselves no another dimension, and this ride, we do together.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

The feelings get all mixed up with reality

A prompt warning: this lesson is much slower. Stay with it. This will be a long, deep breath. The most crucial stage of your instruction. It may seem like you’re not learning much code at first. You will be learning concepts. By the end of this chapter, you will know Ruby’s beauty. The coziness of the code will become a down sleeping bag for your own solace.

A class should have only one reason to change.

There’s so much going on, and the focus is still to keep going, not caring much if I can remember every single detail of the language, instruction etc. It’s about understanding the process, the iteration and trust that at some point it will click.

Beyond the coding classes we’re getting to know each other and at Le Wagon, it feels that we are in Erasmus for adults, where we spend 10 hours a day coding together. Then we party, and Lisbon is pretty ready for that hosting part.