HENNGE: Remote Internship in One of Japan’s Most Diverse Company
Hello everyone, nice to e-meet you! 👋
My name is Denilsen, and you can call me Denil. I am (at this time of writing) a final-year Computer Science student from Bandung, Indonesia. I am one of the interns that participated in HENNGE’s Global Internship Program Batch 1, in the year of 2023.
HENNGE’s Global Internship Program is usually done on-site, where they will fly the interns to Japan, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a remote internship. Actually, my batch is the last remote internship, and after this batch, HENNGE will host the internships on-site (so if you want to try to get experience living and working in Japan, you should apply for it!😜). But even though it is done remotely, I say HENNGE does remote work extremely smoothly and there are no complaints from me about that.
In this Medium post, I will talk about how I found out about this internship program, the whole internship process in general, what I learned from the internship, the fun events in HENNGE, and finally, my summary of the internship program.
Discovering HENNGE + Application Process🚀
Let me explain my background for a bit, I’ve always had a plan to live abroad, and there are actually many countries that are on my bucket list (Europe, Japan, and Singapore). I want to live abroad because I want to learn about the cultures and other people in other countries’ perspectives and lifestyles, I also want to experience living in a completely different environment from what I used to. So when I heard about this internship program from one of my friends and a senior in university, I immediately searched about the program on HENNGE’s website, and luckily the application process is still on going! (I found out about it around October 2022)
Overall the application process is very straightforward and simple. In short, here are the steps that I got to go through:
- Solve the coding challenge (a unique coding challenge that you probably wouldn’t see in other companies);
- Have a phone screening, and finally
- Final technical interview with HENNGE engineers
I got the results exactly 2 weeks after my technical interview, and I was so happy that I was selected as one of the interns for the 1st batch in 2023!🎊
The Actual Internship💻
On our first day, we interns had our PC setup session; we were also introduced to the whole tech team. After that, we had our 1st assignment, on our 1st assignment, we get to develop a full-stack application, from the front end up to a simple deployment to the AWS cloud. While working on the project, I was able to learn so much from the code reviews and references that were given by my mentors (shout out to Sean, Rob, and Takashi-san). I learned about many best practices and dos and don’ts in full-stack development. The 1st assignment lasts for 3 weeks. There were 2 progress meetings for the 1st assignment, where we got to explain our progress regarding the assignment, with the last meetings allocated to present our fully working and deployed app, where all of the mentors and audiences can “play” with our app. Other than the 2 meetings, we also had a stand-up meeting every morning to discuss what have we done the day before, what will we do today, and our blocker (your typical stand-up meeting😸).
For the 2nd assignment, we were tasked to deploy our application to AWS using Terraform, where we needed to adhere to some cloud architecture given by our mentors. This is the first time I was able to learn about dev-ops which I really wanted to learn since I got my hands on web development, so I was very excited about this assignment (no hard feelings for the 1st assignment though😝).
Other Fun Events at HENNGE🎉
MTS (Monthly Technical Session)
MTS is a monthly talk event at HENNGE where employees from the tech team give presentations on topics (both technical and non-technical) that they are passionate about. We interns also get to give presentations in the MTS too! My MTS topic was about a new concept in the frontend framework called “Resumability” where I shared how this new concept can help in optimizing frontend applications.]
Fun Donut
Fun-donut, where we were paired with HENNGE employees at random and had a great conversation with them about literally anything, be it about Japan, our backgrounds and hobbies, or anime. You can literally talk about everything here. I attended three fun-donut and learned something new each time. This is also the display of HENNGE’s diversity because on each fun-donut, I always got paired by people from other countries and backgrounds.
Fun Board Game Night
Every Wednesday, we had fun board game night, where we played many board games such as Codenames, Dixit, and many more. Sadly I only joined this event once because of the timezone difference, and I had other things to attend to😢.
CEO Talk with Ogura-san
This one is particularly interesting because in most companies, you don’t get to interact/talk with the “higher-ups,” but I guess it’s different in HENNGE, because the CEO/CTO schedules a meeting for the interns and new HENNGE employees to talk about HENNGE and its vision. This is a new and humbling experience for me as I get to talk directly with Ogura-san.
Honor Day
On our last day, we “graduated” from GIP because of our achievement in completing the internship program. We were asked to share some words about our experience at HENNGE Global Internship Program, and we were awarded a certificate! After that, we had a casual and warm talk with the employees.
Summary☀️
HENNGE’s GIP is definitely the best internship experience I have ever had so far. It is very wholesome, and you’ll also grow as a software engineer. Even though I was a little bit anxious and nervous at first, the other employees were all warm and welcoming people, so that helped me a lot! If you get the chance to join this internship, please do take your chance. This is an experience you won’t regret!
Until next time, HENNGE!
Denilsen Candiasa graduated from Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. He interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from January 16th to February 10th, 2023
