The unfair advantages of being a Le Wagon teacher: Part 1 Motivation
Hi there! I’m JB, I’m currently the happy CTO and a co-founder of Luvotels.com (we do instant booking for Brazilian motels!) and I have been coding in Ruby and Rails since 2007.
As much as I’d like that to be 2 to 3 years ago it’s actually 11 crazy and amazing years. During that period I have worked for amazing startups at all stages and for a couple enterprises too. We launched many projects with Romain Durritcague and failed many times and yet, we are still here playing.
The problem: my brain had isolated my motivation
In 2016 I was living in São Paulo, working on various projects and looking for a way to improve my Portuguese. I was really happy working on those projects though I did not realize I was carrying them out of habits and willingness. And that ended up draining way too much of my already low energy.
To me, startups need a lot of candidness. You need to free your brain from the notion of impossibility so motivation can flow freely. After 11 years of coding for a lot of amazing clients and startups, impossibility was mainly driving my day to day.
And I believe it’s totally natural, after that time you have the experience to know what not to do, what will take too much time, which trick will make you get 80% out of a feature for 20% of the effort.
It is an amazing skill because you can do a lot of things well and quickly. So… why not let your brain in control?
The thing is: our brains are designed for habits, that’s what’s making us comfy. To carry a startup you need to keep getting out of your comfort zone, I needed my motivation and my candidness back so I could mix it up with my experience and erase the word impossibility from my vocabulary.
The solution: recharge!
So I was in São Paulo looking for ways to improve my PT and… I just basically bumped into Mathieu Le Roux who was looking for teachers to start Le Wagon there. I need to comment that during those 11 years I have had a lot of offers to train people and I always turned them down: training corporates that are there because HR made them be, not for me.
But Le Wagon is different, it’s a 9-week bootcamp (and, simply put, the best in the world): based on Ruby, focused on getting your hands dirty and it’s as practical as possible. The students learn basic programming, then OOP, then database, then front and then… Rails. They learn by doing, in a project-oriented mindset.
It’s a real life experience for the students. And it reaches its climax in the last 2 weeks of the program when they build their own project, previously pitched and student selected, with their own teams. That’s when the magic happens.
To do that you need extreme dedication and a lot of motivation. When you add to that equation the fact that they have no notion of impossibility: BINGO!
Let’s steal that energy to recharge!
Well… that’s not exactly stealing as teaching means gathering some energy to pass to your students ‒ and a great deal of it!‒
But when the students are open-minded and motivated to learn you get way more than you actually give. It’s a pretty good deal!
The conclusion: nothing is impossible (but let’s be efficient)!
Out of the 7 batches I taught ‒ it’s something! ‒ I always got taken back to that great feeling I had myself when starting UpShot in 2007. You can find a lot of articles about the student side of it because it is really a life changing experience but I would love to hear more about how the teachers live it.
Those 2 last weeks have been my energy refill. To see those “young” (not always in age) developers doing crazy things, writing code that would not pass a proper code review and just asking for more until the final demo day, is always a big breath of fresh air.
I feel I’m back working on ideas first and then letting my developer-brain organize/criticize/prepare. I’m back to believing that nothing is impossible and it feels good!
