Best Practice, Best Experience
In 2021, the impact of the pandemic still continued, and many people continued working remotely. Although I also carried out the whole GIP program remotely from my hometown in Dalian, China, the whole experience made me feel like I was at the scene and I had really been there. For me, the biggest gain of this internship was learning the best practices of the industry and the best experience that came from the HENNGE culture.
Best Practice
I have been studying in school for a long time, and my limited internship experience is also concentrated on research assistance-related work. Software development in the industry has always been quite a mystery for me. So when I started the GIP program, I looked forward to being familiarized with many things in the industry, such as corporate thinking, development workflow, industry specifications, code styles, and so on. After four weeks of study, I really gained a lot and learned many best practices for development!
HENNGE’s internship is for everyone to build a prototype of a certain product, so as to familiarize everyone with web development including front-end, back-end, cloud, and other technologies. There are one-to-one mentors, meticulous and patient guidance throughout the process, and much well-written documentation for reference. There will also be a related stand-up meeting to help you solve problems and follow up on the progress.
Our first internship project was to warm up and get familiar with the related HENNGE’s tech stack. The specific application is to build a Twitter clone. This is full-stack application development, including the basic operations of the front and back ends. Before starting, there will be technical training, mainly focusing on some environment construction and related code specifications to help you bootstrap well.
Besides the technology itself, the industrial-level coding workflow really helps me to form many coding habits. Mentors help us to decide detailed specification functionalities, UI/UX, third party’s module selection, database scheme so that we can have a bigger picture of what we should do. Also, for better synchronization, we identify TODO items, create GitHub issues for each item and set task priorities. Unit tests for the application are carefully written using pytest, pytest-flask.
In the first assignment, we learn the basics of web development tools and make sure everything runs locally. Then, we try to move this application to the cloud in the second assignment.
The cloud service we use is AWS. We first build an EC2 instance to run our web application. Then we try a different way of improving the deployment of the web application, that is by containerizing it. We use Terraform as the main development tool and set up AWS services. I need to admit that I’m not quite familiar with these cloud development things, but with the help of the well-designed tutorial and mentor’s guide, I finally made it! It is really exciting to learn so many challenging new things and digest and use it! What’s more, the best practice I learnt has been really useful, helping me deliver results that include improved quality performance, greater productivity, and higher satisfaction!
Best Experience
Orientation
Thanks to so many people's help, we could settle down and start the internship smoothly within such a short time. We had an excellent virtual office tour. It was amazing! Also, the welcome session and interns' lunchtime helped us to know each other better. Even though we were not physically there, we still got many souvenirs and a lovely greeting card. That’s so sweet!
We also had the IT configuration help to set up our PCs and get the ISMS training to make sure our behaviours were within the security requirement. Then to help us know HENNGE more, we had many meetings across different departments. This allowed us to understand how the company operates and how the various departments cooperate and also let us understand as an engineer, how to better focus on technology, focus on business, and focus on customers. and many more. I benefitted a lot.
Activities
Since all work was done online, it was difficult for people to conduct face-to-face activities. But what was very interesting is that there were a lot of virtual activities within HENNGE, which was very cool. They had Fun Language Cafe which discusses a lot of languages and cultural knowledge (Japanese/English), and Fun Cats channel of super cute cats. Every Wednesday at the Board Game Night, you could have fun with everyone playing games. In the Fun Donut channel, everyone was randomly paired with two other members and could schedule a chat with each other to know each other better. There was also a Monthly Technical Session for everyone to share the latest and new cutting-edge technologies with each other and improve their skills. Very interesting! A lot of cute cat pictures made me feel good. Chatting with different people also relieved me of the boredom of working at home alone, and I also learned about the interesting lives of other people. The sharing of different technologies was also very exciting. Join HENNGE, and have fun!
Culture
Last but not the least, I want to share my feeling about the HENNGE culture, which, makes it so unique. People here are so nice and the working environment is so diverse. These many styles that are different from traditional Japanese companies are really fascinating. We had the honour of interacting with the CEO, Ogura san. Because the cloud service provided by HENNGE is a B2B mass product, it pays much attention to customer success. At the same time, because of the characteristics of tech companies and the desire to become a world-class company, HENNGE strives to seek change: change itself, change customers, and change the world! HENNGE is very tolerant of possible failures caused by changes, and this tolerance provides the soil for continuous self-innovation. This has shaped the work culture of the entire company to a certain extent: diversity, openness, tolerance, and communication. This kind of work culture deeply affects every HENNGE employee, and it makes me very cheerful in this short but rewarding internship experience.
All in all, this is a very valuable and enjoyable internship experience. It’s very, very worthwhile. Join HENNGE GIP, have fun!
Gavin, from China, is a student at the University of Malaya in Malaysia. He interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from August 2nd to August 27th , 2021.
