Code, Sakura & Nucleocapsids [Part 1]
Or: how to survive a pandemic in Tokyo.
[Editor’s note: This is part 1 of 2 of Yuri Soares’ first ]
Before starting this post I want to address the reader: yes, that’s you. Chances are that, if you’re reading this post, you’re interested in HENNGE GIP and probably thinking about applying and trying it for yourself. Perfect. I dedicate this post entirely to you. I have read a few other past GIP posts and I think it’s absolutely fascinating how diversely focused each post is, but more on that later. For this post, my main intention is not to be entertaining, but informative: I want to give you all the information — and tips! — that I wanted to give to myself when I was applying but couldn’t find anywhere or was too shy to ask the GTM team (the team that takes care of GIP). By the way, my shyness turned out to be completely unjustified, and you should definitely ask anything to the GTM team, as they are very open and more than willing to help.
Or… at least that was my original intention.
Turns out that my internship batch happened during the (so far) worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic which rendered mine and my fellow interns’ batch a totally exceptional one: the schedule needed to be adjusted, some events got cancelled and we did more remote work than interns usually do.
I’m not saying it was a bad experience. It was not. It was an amazing opportunity and I would do everything again. The reason I’m saying all of this is just so you know that my internship will probably be quite different from yours (unless you do it when another pandemic happens). So I just want to say it upfront to not waste anybody’s time: if you’re looking for a more “vanilla” GIP post, there are plenty of great ones from other past interns (feel free to check the end of this post for some of my personal suggestions). But now, if you want to know what happens when countries start locking down, toilet paper runs out and nobody is quite sure how to react, please read on!
I am also assuming you already know all the publicly available information about GIP, such as schedules, subsidies, and insurance. If you don’t, please check out the GIP webpage, it contains all the canonical information and should be your starting point in this adventure.
With all that being said, let’s jump right into it!
Before arriving
The admission challenge
As we all know, GIP doesn’t start in Tokyo. It starts right wherever you are when you decide you want to do it and take the admission challenge. It may have already started for you, so good luck! I’m not sure how many different admission challenges problem statements there are and, honestly, it doesn’t really matter.
Keep in mind that GIP is not a walk in the park. You will have a ton of fun, but will also work hard, especially when you see that your mentors are expecting great things from you (more on that later).
Unless you are already a pro in RESTful architecture, AWS, SaaS and dev-ops, you will research a lot on your own, experiment new tech daily, and hopefully break lots of things. Learn by doing it.
(In case you are a pro, you may just want to apply for full-time already.)
For now, if you could solve the admission challenge on your own while proactively researching the bits you didn’t know, it means that you know how to program and basic networking. Therefore, you should be good to go!
The selection process
After finishing the challenge, you will receive instructions to upload your resume for screening and a cover letter. HENNGE is definitely not a stiff formal company so feel free to be a bit loose and show your personality in the cover letter. (I know I did and apparently, it was okay.)
Passing the screening, you should be invited for a virtual interview. Don’t worry, it’s not a technical interview. The team will just ask you about your past experience and check if you’re a good fit for the program. (I suppose this interview is also useful to check that you’re a real person.)
A word of encouragement: don’t feel bad if you couldn’t get the GIP offer. This program is truly global and lots of very talented people apply for it, including you. It seems that in every batch the team receives a truckload of applications and some very hard decisions have to be made in the selection process. If your personal/academic planning enables it, make sure to keep trying! In other cases, you can also try full-time positions. Never give up!
The preparation (a.k.a. choosing a house)
Congratulations on nailing that challenge, screening and interviews, you can breathe now. All the bureaucratic steps are going to be arranged for you. You’ll probably just have to email your documents and the sleek GTM team will send instructions according to your situation. In my case, I had to go to the Japanese consulate in my country to get a visa, but it really depends on your context.
What the GIP team won’t do for you is tell where you should live, that’s up to you. The stipend is pretty enough to live comfortably in Tokyo, even though it’s an expensive city. You basically have to choose if you want to share a place or not. Of course, sharing is much cheaper but it may not be for everyone. If you’re considering getting a place for your own, also make sure to check out hotel rooms/AirBnB. Sometimes getting a hotel room at an acceptable distance can be cheaper than renting a place, plus it is less bureaucratic and you may get breakfast! AirBnBs are tricky: some are non-shared, not that expensive, and quite good. The catch is that they are usually not available for long contiguous stays like the GIP’s 6-week period. If you’re up for the effort, you could book 2 or 3 different ones and split your stay in 3 or 2-weeks chunks. On the plus side, you’ll get to experience different neighborhoods, if you’re into that kind of stuff. Be aware that if you book an AirBnB in your country, you may need to pay it in advance using your local currency, but you will be paid in Japanese Yens regardless. So, factor in possible currency conversion fees.
Don’t be too hesitant about getting a more distant place, the transportation system is effective and the office has an accessible location. Even if you stay in some places outside of Tokyo itself, you may still be able to get to the office in less than an hour, just make sure you research it beforehand. Also, if it’s your first time in Japan and you’re like me, you probably won’t be staying much time at home anyway. There’s plenty to explore in your free time! (Again, if it’s not a pandemic.)
Unfortunately, there’s no clear winner and the decision depends more on your profile and personal preferences. The chart above is in no way a definitive answer and is based solely on my personal experience and tastes. I recommend you take your time to carefully consider all the possible options.
After arriving
Well, you arrived in Japan and got yourself a shiny new home! Good, now let’s talk a bit about the work itself. Originally, I was planning to write here a daily log, with all the minute details of everyday work. But I realized that it wasn’t really necessary: some days ended up being pretty similar to each other and a daily log would be flat out boring to read. Instead, I choose to go with a weekly log for better granularity while also giving you a good sense of chronology. The internship had 6 weeks (30 weekdays with 1 holiday), which were unequally divided into 3 assignments. In my batch, the 1st assignment had 2 weeks, the 2nd had only 1 week and the remaining 3 weeks are for the 3rd and final assignment. The first and last days are a notable exception and may include other activities. Also, it is probable that your internship batch will have at least 1 holiday and if it happens to be on a Friday or Monday you may get a 3-day off, so research beforehand to make the most of it! (Kyoto trip, anyone?)
1st week
“The beginnings of all things are small.” ― Cicero
1st day
You arrive in the office for the first time and your first day schedule is packed, so be prepared! Probably, the first thing you will do after arriving is meeting your fellow interns in the same batch as yours that also just arrived. You may also meet other HENNGE newcomers that are not necessarily in the GIP, but could be new full-timers, part-timers or interns from non-tech division. Everyone will be waiting in the same reception and this is already a good opportunity to mingle with members that are not in GIP. In fact, I met another non-GIP newcomer on this occasion who turned out to be a great friend throughout my internship.
After that, you will probably meet the GTM (Global Talent Marketing) team members in person for the first time and realize that they are actual people and not only floating email addresses!
Shortly after, they took us to an office tour, where one can hear more about the office history and other charming quirks such as the Dr. Pepper vending machine. On a clear day, you can even see Mt. Fuji from the office’s upper floor.
After the tour, you will probably be guided to the PC setup with the hardware back office. Remember that HENNGE is a security-focused company and special care is taken when setting up your corporate PC and phone. Pro-tip: come up ahead of time with a secure and unique password that you will remember. This will avoid hastily creating one on the spot that you might forget later.
Besides the company notebook, you will also get the corresponding adapters and a smartphone with a data plan of 5GB. Make sure to set up Slack and Calendar notifications in your corporate phone so you will not miss any meeting rescheduling or important messages — speaking from experience. Also, you will have to return everything on your last day, so make sure to not mix with your own cables/devices. Even though you probably won’t need them, a mouse and keyboard are not provided (at least not in my batch) so, if you really want to use them, just bring your own.
When getting your devices and setting up your password, you will have a quick security training, where you will learn about company security and access control policies. (I will refrain from commenting on WFH policy here because my batch was definitively exceptional on that.)
With the PC setup done, it’s time to meet the engineering team and have your first GIP lunch together! GIP lunches are paid by the company and usually have one GIP intern and two full-timers. However, the first one was a bit different and had all GIP interns and a couple of full-timers lunching together all at once.
1st assignment
After lunch, you all will have your first meeting regarding the 1st assignment. All GIP interns and some members of the engineering team attended this meeting which was basically explaining the 1st assignment as well as introducing who each intern’s mentor was. For each assignment, you will have one to two mentors, who are basically someone who you can ask questions and talk about your difficulties and approaches to problems. The 1st assignment is actually quite broad and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at first, especially if you never heard about all the pertinent technology. In case you want to know more about the used stack, here’s a succinct description of our 1st assignment, trying to use as much tech jargon and links as I can:
For the 1st assignment, we were asked to implement a simplified Twitter clone using the Flask web framework, Redis as database and S3 as storage (for images) with Boto 3, while local testing could use minio. The app should use Google’s OAuth, not reimplementing auth itself. We should also implement an original feature of our choosing. homebrew and Docker were recommended for software packages. Development was done in Github, using git-flow / GitHub flow. Finally, the app should be deployed manually in EC2, served with Gunicorn and NGINX with HTTPS encryption provided by Let’s Encrypt.
Phew, that was a mouthful! If you haven’t heard about most, or even all, of the tools/services above, don’t despair! Nobody will assume that you know it all and there will be some time to research and get familiarized with them. Also, the mentors will be there to help you in case you get stuck or need help.
Coffee time
After the 1st assignment meeting, while everything was still sinking in, we approached a crucial point in the daily routine: coffee time. You see, HENNGE has a very lively culture and one of its embodiments happens during the daily coffee break. In theory, it’s quite simple: someone brews coffee and an IOT device notifies a Slack channel when coffee is ready. But, in practice, I could see that this small moment was so much more. It’s a time to unwind, congregate with people that you usually wouldn’t meet, set aside your tasks for a moment and remember that we are all in this together, both literally and figuratively. As a bonus, people often bring coffee from different places or their recent travels, so there’s also an air of novelty in each cup.
Culture meeting
For our final meeting of the first day, we had a culture meeting, also including other newcomers. This meeting was very informal and mostly consisted of a laid-back and quite pleasant chat about the company. After that, we took our batch “official photo” and resumed our assignment work.
End of 1st day
After such a long day, we decided to end it with some well-deserved gyūkatsu at a nearby restaurant.
Remaining of 1st week
The 2nd day was our first “normal” day. We were still learning the routine and mostly working on our assignments, talking to our mentors and having coffee time as usual.
On the 3rd day, we had our first “standard” GIP lunch. As mentioned earlier, these are lunch outings paid by HENNGE with usually one intern and two full-timers from any division. Tokyo’s cuisine is internationally acclaimed and Shibuya (where the HQ is located) has its fair share of great restaurants. Usually, I was contacted by my co-lunchers through Slack politely asking if I had any food restrictions or anything specific that I wanted to try, which I usually awkwardly replied something like: “Anything it ok! Where do you folks like to lunch?”. And that turned out awesome, as all the suggestions were superb and I would never have found those places by myself. But I will let the pictures speak for themselves.
Board game night
3rd day was also a Wednesday, which means board game night! I was surely looking forward to this night and I was not disappointed. Refreshments are provided and there is a big collection of board games to try out with your fellow coworkers. In case you’re wondering, participation is not mandatory in any way. So if you’re not really into board games and free food, you won’t feel any pressure to stay.
On our 4th day, we had our first “Progress meeting” of the 1st assignment. This was a good opportunity to show our progress and get some feedback from the mentors. It was also quite nice to see the different ideas and approaches taken by the other interns as some of the assignment specs were purposefully left open. The mentors reassured us that this was not a competition and we were encouraged to share ideas and help each other when developing our apps.
You may be thinking that our first progress meeting was a bit early, as we only had roughly two days of work. Indeed you’re right, the first progress meeting should usually happen on the 5th day (Friday of 1st week). However, this day turned out being a holiday so the meeting got brought forward to the 4th day.
End of part one. You can read part two here!
Yuri Soares is from Brazil and studied at Universidade Estadual De Campinas, Brazil. He interned at HENNGE Global Internship Program from 16th March to 24th April, 2020.
