Encyclopædia Shibuya (by Arvind)
You find yourself in an unfamiliar place, somehow managing to not get distracted by the throngs of people zigzagging around you, you see the sign that says “Shibuya”. You’ve been brought to this mysterious land to participate in an extended event known as the “Global Internship Program” at HDE. We’ll get to what that entails soon enough. But first, you need to find a place to rest…
Quest 1 — Finding your lodging
Narrators note: I highly recommend staying in this share house, as it is only a five minute walk to HDE(even closer than the Shibuya station) and literally every amenity is convenient and always available to you. It’s in a slightly shady neighbourhood but I think the pros outweigh the cons
Share houses, such as the one mentioned above, are great options for short-term stay in Tokyo. Renting at a Sakura House does not require you to spend a lot of time in cahoots with a real-estate agent or paying several months of rent as a deposit fee. Sakura Houses also are exclusive to non-locals so you end up meeting a lot of other young people in Japan for reasons similar to your own and it ends up easier to make friends and explore. Sakura House also organizes events every couple of weeks such as tours, karaoke, and festivals. I joined a couple and they’re usually well organized and really fun too.
It is possible to rent apartments from agencies like Sakura House and Oak House especially if you would like more privacy and your own place, but there are other websites and companies that specialize in those. Being able to speak Japanese would make things a LOT easier if you do decide to take that route.
Quest 2 — Day 1 at HDE
On a warm day as seasons begin to slowly shift from Summer to Autumn, you find yourself pacing towards a large glass-paneled tower bearing the board “Glass City Shibuya”. The spotless and barely visible gates slide open as you drift towards the elevator and get transported to the tenth floor of this structure.
Here you meet Ogura-san, the founder of this company who introduces you to the history and the guiding principles of the company(hint: change is good).
The remainder of the day passes by like a typhoon( ̶t̶w̶o̶- three of which you would experience in the coming weeks, but you don’t know that yet) as you are whisked around location to location, meeting people and learning about the practices you would be following and taking part in, over the next eight weeks.
Quest 3 — Code Monkey get up, get coffee
Before you can get your inexperienced intern hands on the real software, you will be given a solid training in all the main aspects of web development — frontend, backend, and even dev-ops. You, with your GIP peers, each gets paired up with a mentor and are guided step by step through planning, building and deploying a real-world web application from the ground up. With appropriate ‘nudges’ from the people around you, you notice your skills as a developer soar and you begin to feel confident enough to add your own innovations to your idea and find your perfect niche in the process you would like to explore.
The interns are then given tasks related to the actual work of the company in a sub-team that fits your interest and skills. You might work on issues, new features, or improvements to the current system that really do play a part in the bigger scope of the company’s offerings.
Apart from the work itself, there are many hobby groups (the fun-*s) in the internal communication system ranging from basketball and billiards to karaoke and gaming. There are weekly board game meetups and a fresh brew of coffee every day, where you may take a few minutes to rest your eyes from your 8 tmux panes with monokai vim panels on your dual-monitor set up.
Quest 4 — A foodies guide to the galaxy (or Shibuya, at least)
Shibuya, which is where the HDE office is, is one of the most active neighborhoods in the metropolis with hundreds of ‘must-visit’ restaurants. The interns get to enjoy about 10 GIP lunches where you get paired up with employees at HDE who take you to really nice paid lunches around the area which you might not have visited on your own.
Shibuya houses some of the classics, like Ichiran ramen - a world-renowned tonkotsu ramen chain perfectly optimized to not have to interact with others, conveyor belt sushi places, and several different types of izakayas and bars that pack the streets in the evenings. You also have the opportunity to try traditional Japanese food or even go crazy with foreign cuisines from around the world.
Here’s a handy chart for reference for the rating scales on Tabelog:
< 3 = not recommended
3–3.2 = decent, worth checking out
3.2–3.5 = a great place, usually at a fair premium
>3.5 = probably a life changing experience
One thing you should definitely take advantage of is that even some of the best restaurants make sure to have a lunch meal for 1000–1500 JPY, even if they charge 4–5x that much for dinner. If you’re on a strict budget, fast food diners like Sukiya and Matsuya are all around the place and convenience stores (pronounced: konbini) have cheap, decent tasting meals too.
“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so”
— Mos Def à la Ford Prefect
Quest 5 — Settle it with a game of Dice
A gamer at heart, you always carry around a dice-set on the lookout for others of the same ilk, and at HDE, you feel right at home. A weekly board-game night has players of all backgrounds surround a table, eat dinner together before separating off into smaller groups, each playing a different game. Every week you could try a new game — some with cards, others with large boards and tokens and others with nothing but a set of manuals each over 200 pages in length (and more, some of which are intimidating just to look at.
I joined these religiously and even manage to band together a crew to create a recurring weekly event for a Dungeons & Dragons game that we played for a month.
Final thoughts
The HDE Global Internship Program is really an incredible experience that I highly recommend. They create the perfect welcoming atmosphere that allows you to stay in the zone as you maximize your learning through the entire two months. All the coworkers are friendly and approachable and never hesitate to include you in activities even if it is outside of work. Language was not once a concern at the office as everyone uses English as the primary mode of communication, both at meetings as well as informally. The interns are provided freedom to innovate and bring their ideas to the table at meetings and seminars and it’s pretty likely that you’ll be allowed to explore them even if they have chances of not working or being viable. A recurring theme in this post, I’ll finish it off with another quote from the Hitchhiker’s guide —
“So long and thanks for all the fish”
