I Attended 2 Free Le Wagon Events So You Don’t Have To | A Detailed Review
I was just casually browsing my email like any normal human being would when you’re bored, just skipping but not deleting most emails because maybe I’ll read it in the future which explains my thousands of unread emails. And only clicking on emails that intrigue me which is probably… like 1 out of the 200 other TechInAsia, LinkedIn and Medium Daily Digest newsletters that I signed up for, thinking that I’ll be interested in it and hey, maybe it’ll make me look smarter. Ya know, being subbed to all these news… and stuff…… sigh.
I saw this very generic email title by Meetup — “Top suggestions for you this week” was all it wrote. But I clicked on it anyway.
“How to launch a product in 9 weeks” by Le Wagon, a coding bootcamp, was the first event that appeared. Sounds interesting. Then further down, “Data Analysis for Beginners” Oooohhhh.
I clicked into the Data Analysis event and read through what it will cover: an introduction to data analysis. No prerequisite! Demo with Jupyter Notebooks. I was intrigued. But what got me hooked and had me sign up on the spot was that it is free.
I mean, I’m all for free shit. You know those food samples you can get at supermarkets? You bet your ass I’ll walk a couple of laps around the sample cart awkwardly asking for more samples as the salesperson side-eyes me and snarls quietly under their breath as I ask for samples for the 100th time.
After I was done filling in my details, I was led into yet another page filled with all of Le Wagon’s events and saw the event on launching a product in 9 weeks again. For that event, you get a playbook of all the steps to launch a product and examples, resources and case studies.
I shrugged, I don’t really have anything to do on a Monday evening at 6.30pm anyway. *Click Sign up*
Both courses started at 6.30pm and coincidentally were held by Miguel Jiménez which was intriguing to me because it truly showed his breadth of knowledge though as I went through both courses, I felt like his strength is more so in product development.
There’ll be an email with the zoom meeting link that’s sent about 10 minutes before the course starts. The Data Analytics (DA) course was 2 hours long whereas the Product Launching (PL) one was 1.5 hours long.
The class sizes were relatively small — the DA had maybe 23 people whereas PL had only 13. But boy oh boy, just because a class size is bigger, doesn’t mean the people are engaging with the instructor.
It was evident, whenever Miguel asked a question during the DA course, that only 1 person would respond and only about a minute of awkward silence later. I almost had to check my internet connection because I thought I dropped out of the call with how long the silence lasted. The PL one on the other hand had multiple people answering and asking questions throughout the session.
I can’t tell you exactly what it means for the type of people that were attending let alone the engagement rate but… you could probably come to some conclusions yourself.
The Quiet AF Data Analytics Course
The DA course had its hands-on project where Miguel introduced the Jupyter notebook and used Kaggle for Airbnb’s Open Data. He also imported pandas, matplotlib, seaborn and pyplot (from matplotlib) to produce the graphs.
As with all demos, there were some hiccups getting it started and getting everyone synced. Once in awhile there were people who’re clearly, very clearly beginners to coding because they’ll ask vague questions like “Help Miguel, I can’t run the program” without giving any other statements on what the issue is. I mean come on, he can’t reach through your computer screen to help you if you can’t provide more information!
I wish that’s how debugging works. If only all IT support personnel could just reach through your screen to answer why your laptop isn’t turning on when you don’t even know where the ‘on’ button is… life would be so much easier.
There were also times when he had to go back and refer to his codes again so others could keep up with him but I think that’s only fair considering the course is meant for beginners.
His entire demo was filled with questions such as “What is the distribution of flat prices based on neighbourhood groups?” or “ How many listings are there per neighbourhood group?” and so forth to kickstart the demo.
The only thing I felt throughout the demo was that it was rushed because everything was very touch and go.
Could I fault him for it? Maybe, maybe not. As someone who has a programming background, it was much easier to follow what he was doing without skipping a beat. But he never really explained the questions nor explained his answer.
I found myself asking ‘Why did you use this graph? How did your question prompt you to decide on whether to use a violin graph over a bar graph?’ and sure, it might be a little complex to explain the rationale in 2 hours, but I felt that the demo was more quantity over quality.
It was definitely a decent introduction to Jupyter and the libraries/packages that you can use to display graphs but it wasn’t as clear as I hoped it would be.
Maybe the target audience could’ve been tweaked to suggest introducing it to people who have basic knowledge on statistics but are not sure how to take it to the next level with the available technologies.
Or maybe there could be pre-course readings or preparation so no time is wasted getting everyone set up on Jupyter. Just anything to provide more time to the demo since it is a big chunk of the course.
The More Engaging Product Launching Course
For the ‘Launch a Product in 9 Weeks’ course, I think it has a surprisingly more logical flow than the data analytics one. He had a playbook — which if you want more details on, maybe check out Le Wagon’s events in the future — and he went through each section of it with sufficient detail.
The class was also pretty engaged. There were people constantly asking questions like ‘how do you know what’s the best hire for x role’ or ‘will your current company try to own the start-up you created whilst you’re still working from them’ (which by the way he just skirted around — But I think that’s fair. It’s a difficult topic to give general advice on and hope it works) and I kind of enjoyed how engaging it was.
It was eye-opening to learn about something else that’s very different from what I know and am used to learning about.
The only qualm I have is that this playbook is pretty specific towards tech start-ups.
His tips are generally geared towards what languages and libraries to use so that you can have a lightweight tech product and can work on it quickly. He talks about scrum planning using Trello, how to design a low-fidelity interface on Figma or InVision before handing it off to the UI Designer, how big a team should be and with what kinds of roles and most of his examples revolve around a start-up in the tech industry.
Obviously, the world right now is filled, to the fucking brim with tech start-ups. So it would’ve been nice to hear a slightly different perspective once in awhile on a physical product start-up. How it’ll change if let’s say I’m releasing an ultra-powerful-wheelchair that can prepare food and move as fast as a bicycle but for elderlies as a product instead.
But then again, I guess the 13 or so other attendees found the course to be targeted for them and they seem to enjoy it.
At the end of both courses, without a doubt Miguel would start doing a promotion about all the paid courses Le Wagon has revolving around either coding workshops or product development workshops. I have no issues with attending a free online workshop to be promoted to at the end of the course. I even think it’s pretty clever. And more props to him for being able to suck in 40 people over 2 days (so far) to effectively promote Le Wagon and their courses through free workshops.
They’ll also only give you the link to the resources (slides and demo materials) only after you do up a feedback form at the end of the session. This makes sure you stay for the entirety of the course and not just attend, attain the resources and leave (which is hella rude).
And even then, the link you receive sends you to an onboarding link so you have to sign up for a Le Wagon account before you gain access to the resources. Extremely clever, I say.
I do wish online workshops would continue to be the norm even after COVID-19. Heck, maybe even do a half-online, half-physical workshop! Where you live-stream the physical workshop if you still choose to hold one, because I know I sure as heck am not going down for a workshop where I’ll just end up sitting at the furthest row at the back, away from everyone and squinting at the slides I can barely see cause the font’s probably gonna be pretty small then slinking away without anyone noticing before the workshop officially ends so I don’t have to interact with anyone and pretend I’m not just someone in my early 20s with too much time on my hands joining a workshop for fun when everyone else seems to take it pretty seriously.
I would rather be comfortable at home, in my singlet and shorts with my hair in a bun and being able to dig my nose without anyone double taking my way.
But of course, to all you readers out there — go and join these free workshops. Obviously you don’t have to join a Le Wagon workshop (because I’m not getting paid or sponsored to say any of this shit, afterall, I’m only doing this out of pure interest), and I know my title is kinda clickbaity and almost feels like I’m saying ‘don’t waste your time!’ but honestly, I think it’s always nice to expand your knowledge, hear from experts and just learn.
You might not know anything when you enter that zoom meeting, but for sure you’ll walk away (or like, turn off zoom) with new information to help you broaden your capabilities and fields of interests.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, let me know by leaving me some claps! It is very helpful to know what sort of content is interesting to my readers! :)
Also, if you’ve attended workshops like these, or intend to, let me know how it goes! I would love to hear from you!
