The notion of going to Japan and having work experience there was something I only put as a lifegoal as I sometimes believed that it was tad too high of a dream. Not only that it’s somewhere very far from my home country (Indonesia), the language barrier and the difference in living cost is simple not something that I think I would get myself into. It’s really something that I wished upon a shooting star. Or something like that, haha.

But, guess what? Dreams can really become reality. Here I would like to tell a story of my albeit-short journey on realizing my small childish dream. The writing style will mostly resemble a casual blog post, so please excuse for any unprofessional words or terms.

Where It All Began

I was a university student majoring on Informatics Engineering at Bandung Institute of Technology. Granted, the chance to go into various fields here are all-time high as it was one of the top universities in my country. But it’s not an exclusive benefit or privilege as the challenge (explained below) is open to anybody in the world! There is no need to worry about your background as what matters the most is your skill. I was only lucky that I got the chance to attend the info session which was held in a classroom near my class.

What really piqued my interest was the field, the products, that HENNGE is working on. I was just beginning to dive deeper into cybersecurity stuffs when HENNGE info session was held. I knew it was my call. So I went there, stood there, and just hooked. I remember that I asked so many questions that I was awarded with ramune candy (ラムネ飴) haha.

The bottom line is there is a challenge that you can attempt. It comes with special requirements for each of the steps, but it doesn’t have any time limit. I attempted the challenge back in October 2019 and just finished the main challenge in early 2020.

The moment I jumped from my seat

After that, I was reached to continue further. When everything seems just too good to be true, COVID-19 pandemic happened. Borders were closed, the initial plan was put on-hold, and major change happened to the world. Everyone was forced to stay at home and it really changed a lot of our daily habits. Everyone had to adapt.

Previously I was offered for November 2021 batch, which I had to decline as it was during my thesis writing period and I simply couldn’t leave my campus during that time. So I dropped the offer and applied again on next opening batch, which didn’t happened until late 2021.

People are transitioning from the remote work to on-site work, slowly. The batches that were opened was conducted in “Hybrid” fashion, that is to say, half of the internship will be held remotely, while the other half be held on-site. I didn’t think much about it on that moment, so I just went to finish all the challenge under an hour, and finally get myself another chance yet again. It wasn’t a long process as I went through several interview process after that.

And there comes the waiting moment.

And here I jumped from my seat yet again.

And I couldn’t be happier.

The Off-site Internship: Remote

As you can see, my internship started on May 2022. That time I was with Sunisth, which another intern from India. We were welcomed with the entire team, where Ogura-san (our CEO) was there to welcome us too. It was such an honor and skyrocketed my “energy” to do this internship.

Me (bottom right) and Sunisth (2nd from top left) in welcoming session

The contents of the internship was divided into two parts:

Assignment 1: Frontend and Backend

Here we were tasked to create a web application. There were a lot of components to build and as fore mentioned before, being a company that provides cybersecurity product, it has to be secure. It was a challenge by itself, and definitely learned a lot from the process and the feedbacks.

Assignment 2: DevOps

To have a product means that it has to be usable while also being resilient. The process of creating a web application does not stop on creating the application itself; you have to deploy the application. And that’s the core point of this assignment. As I have strong background in DevOps and cloud infrastructure beforehand, this assignment went like a breeze.

But it didn’t just stop there.

Team meeting. Pic source

Not only there were a lot of sessions where we got to know about the company, teams, and the products better, there were a lot of fun sessions too! Attended the board game night and it was a blast. Had a good laugh, while at the same time realizing how young I am, XD.

Other than that, there was a program called MTS (Monthly Technical Session) where people are invited to share something interesting. I got a chance to talk about something I was working on my thesis, which about WebGPU. The full post on the MTS I was participating can be read here.

My presentation. Pic source

There was a beer bash after the MTS and I was quite sad that I wasn’t there. I hoped for a chance to be there to experience the atmosphere.

And that was it. 3 weeks of remote internship went just without me noticing. At the end of our internship, we were welcomed yet again for a farewell party, which dubbed “GIP Honor Day”.

I was happy with my result and grateful with the experience. I wished it could be longer..

After the internship is over, I graduated from my university and was down for the real world. The world is slowly recovering and we started to see companies switching back to on-site work. The borders start to loosen and bit by bit it opens back to visitors.

And…

I jumped for the 3rd time

I couldn’t get even happier. My wish to visit Japan would come true.

The On-Site Internship: Arrival (到着)

It wasn’t easy to prepare for the trip. As the internship happened in Winter, coming from tropical nation made the logistic preparation needs to be thorough. There was also lodging and accommodation, which in my case I reached the other intern, Nikhil, to talk if it’s possible to rent a room together. Lesson learned is to order myself a winter coat that is large enough. I underestimated the sheer cold of winter, but also very excited of the sheer cold. The other thing is the Visa to Japan, which thankfully was assisted by HENNGE. It was tough, but I was on absolute happiness when I received my Visa.

As the airplane ticket had been handled by the GIP team, it was just about time to go to Japan. I picked Narita Airport as my arrival destination because I kinda want to try Narita Express, haha.

I arrived on snowy day, which I was considered very lucky as it was: mostly only snowing 2 days in Tokyo, and to see snow is one of my lifegoals. My reactions were pretty much like this.

“Ahh! Snow! Coool!!!!!! Finally!!! Yeah!!!”

And in one minute or less, turned to

“IT’S COLD. AAAAAAAAAAAAA”

As my lodging was in Sendagaya, my journey from Narita Airport was like this :

Narita Airport -> Take Narita Express to Shibuya -> Transit in Shibuya -> Take Yamanote Line heading to Yoyogi Station -> Stop on Yoyogi Station -> Walk to my lodging.

Near Yoyogi Station, fully immersing myself on how cold winter is in Tokyo

The place me and Nikhil stayed at called SAKURA HOUSE located in Sendagaya. It was a very strategic place that’s about 2 minutes walk from Kita-sando Station. There are Family Mart just near the main street, LAWSON, and Subway. Great place, ain’t it?

The first day was just me adjusting myself to the sheer cold, unwrapping my baggage, and to internalize the fact that I was in Japan.

As I arrived at Friday, we had the entire weekend free to ourselves before attending our first day for on-site internship. Being an avid otaku I am, the first weekends were spent exploring the entire Akihabara. 幸せでした

Then, comes the reason why I was there. The on-site internship.

The On-site Internship: First Day

The work hour starts at 10AM JST, which was very great for me as I am not such of a morning person. It also resulted in a great situation where we didn’t need to face the infamous train rush hour. So most of the time, the passengers were just enough, not too crowded.

Walking to Kita-sando Station

As we were very close to Kita-sando Station, we went there and take the only line; Fukutoushin Line; and head to Shibuya Station. It was about 5 minutes from Kita-sando Station to Shibuya Station. And after arriving at Shibuya Station, we took a walk to HENNGE office, located just ahead of the end of Dougenzakaue (道玄坂上). A little of 10 minutes to 15 minutes walk and you’re off to go.

On our first day, we got orientation and office tour as how HENNGE office looks like. The one that took my interest is the Forest section, which really resembles a forest… in decoration

And then there were meetings for preparing our devices, lunches, and explanations on our assignment. Me and Nikhil had different assignment, therefore different mentors and different scope.

To talk about my assignment, it was mostly about creating a new service that runs on the edge. As we are deploying to cloud services in programmatic manner, everything must be built as an Infrastructure-as-Code definition. It was a complex assignment, but is sufficient for 3 weeks period. As it really closely related to cloud engineering, I felt that I was blessed and started working on it right away.

The day ended at 7PM JST (19.00). It was a long day, and definitely lots of things need to be processed.

The On-site Internship: Typical Day

So, people might ask,

“How is the typical day as an intern in HENNGE?”

Glad you ask. I can pretty much summarize my routines to this list.

Arrive to office. Check-in in designated Slack channel. Explain my targets and plans for the day. 10AM
働く！Work! Sometimes there are meetings to attend. 10AM ~ 12AM
Lunch! 昼食！12AM ~ 1PM
Work Phase 2. Usually this will last until the end of the day. There might be meetings in-between. 1PM ~ 7PM.
Free time, yay!

Usually, the day would end at 7PM unless there are events hosted by our seniors. Such events like board game night or karaoke night. As I mentioned on the remote internship part, I really wanted to participate in the board game night, and so I did. And it was a blast! (with side effect raising my trust issues haha).

As my day ended together with the other intern, Nikhil, we went to our lodging together and it usually took us about 30 minutes. But the 2nd to last week I got back at home at 9PM as I discovered there was a game center just behind Shibuya Station.

The On-site Internship: Events

The monotonous life of a black-collar salaryman cannot be found here as we were constantly had various of events. There were GIP Lunches, Donut session, and big events such as Communication Meeting, MTS, and other celebratory events!

On GIP lunches, we got many chances to meet people from different departments. We had lunch and talk about ourselves, and I never felt like it was too long. I wished for it to be longer even as people here are much of great people, with different interests, personality, nationality, and backgrounds. The diversity made me feel a lot easy as I didn’t need to worry about my status as foreigner (外人)

On Donut session, it was just like GIP lunch but without lunch. It was very similar with the Donut session on my remote internship as it was mostly conducted online. But that doesn’t reduce the fun. I got to meet different people and learn about them and share about mine.

MTS is same as before, except that I was there in the office. I insisted that I wanted to bring another talk, which caught our mentors by surprise, haha! I talked about Terramate on my presentation titled “Terramate: A (somehow) better way to handle my exponentially-growing Terraform codebase”. It was thrilling but I was very proud of it. And in the end, we had beer bash, except I was there! To quote Nikhil, the other intern, words.

“After this talk, I will be the most happy person in Tokyo”

It goes without saying that I felt the same emotion too. We had great night and great weekends afterward.

The On-site Internship: Leisure Time

One great thing about the internship is that we were allowed to go anywhere, even outside Tokyo, on our free time. Of course, aside doing my ritual of going to Akihabara once a week, I visited many other places such as Asakusa, Shinjuku, Yokohama, and even had the chance to go to Kyoto. We were provided smartphone with SIM card so we can stay connected without the need of public WiFi. But rest assured, the Tokyo region really has many open public free WiFi, and it’s almost guaranteed that every train station has one.

The only challenge I faced was the language barrier. Although I already on the JLPT N3 Level for my Japanese skill, I was “slapped” by how little that was compared to the things that I went through. The daily conversation was especially a lot faster, the signs are very elaborate with most kanji I have never seen before, and it pretty much resulted with lots of difficulties on hearing the announcements. Then again, I challenged myself to not open Google Translate, and I survived! The store clerk or waiter staffs were also aware if you’re a foreigner, and most places already has English versions of the instructions/menu. So rest assured, even for a beginner in Japanese, Tokyo is already friendly enough. Just make sure your English is up to daily conversational level too :D

Over time, I grew interest to the train system in Tokyo. There are many train lines that covers lots of places in Tokyo, so basically you can go anywhere by train. For starter, there is Yamanote Line that goes full circle between major stations in Tokyo. From there, you can do transit to take another train line if you want to go to specific places. As there are several train companies in Tokyo, when switching between lines, you’ll need to pay for additional fare when the lines are from different train company. I really took my time to read the routes, lines, and how trains are interconnected. But if you’re in a hurry or in doubt, you can always rely on Google Maps. The schedule are also synchronized and you can always rely on the departure time of the trains.

How about the food? Being a muslim, it wasn’t easy to find a perfectly Halal certified food. Although there are places that only serves Halal food, it’s mostly very far, so I resorted to Convenience Store food, or vegetarian option. There are also restaurants that serve chicken only dishes, which I loved the most as the taste and the portion is much bigger. As I’ve known that Japan is home to onigiri and various variety of sandwich, I tried almost every single options. My personal favorite is shrimp mayonaise onigiri, umeboshi (pickled plum) onigiri, chicken katsu sandwich, and shrimp katsu sandwich.

The On-site Internship: Closing

As every events have starting point, the internship had come to an end. On our last week, aside from the events mentioned above, we had progress meeting to present about the result of our assignments, and also two-way discussion about how the internship went. For my case, I managed to finish my assignment with additional bonus task, which something I’m really proud of.

The closing ceremony was similar with the remote internship, but I was there! We had the “GIP Honor Day” conducted in the office and on Zoom meeting so everyone can attend!

Me, Nikhil, and the head of CPRD team

Honor Day attendees

Probably another instance where me and Nikhil both said “After this, I will be the happiest person in Tokyo”, haha.

It didn’t lasted long, so was the internship. Still couldn’t believe that 3 weeks went just like that. We ended our day with offboarding process, that is, to return our devices and doing farewells with other people.

Of course, since the office has Dr. Pepper vending machine that’s free for it’s employees, I took a chance to take my last Dr. Pepper. It felt amazing.

Epilogue

The entire experience from the remote internship and on-site internship was one of most amazing experience during the past 12 months. I’d say that it’s the perfect combination of two, as I was granted internship experience before I graduated, and granted the working-ish experience after my graduation. The duration was also just perfect as it wasn’t that long that I started to feel homesick, but if I would be given option to choose between hybrid and full on-site internship, I’d choose the latter. The memories of strolling around Tokyo, the announcements on the train and station, and the food, those really rings thorough my time writing this post.

At last, I’d express my biggest gratitude to Allah SWT for giving me this chance, and to everyone in HENNGE, from our CEO, Ogura-san, my mentors, Habibi-san, Michael-san, Jonas-san, Hans-san, folks over the ETA Team that painstakingly took care of us before, during, and after the internship, Yuri-san, Daniel-san, Akane-san, Jazman-san, the folks on IIT team for providing us the facilities, and lastly, Nikhil as my roommate. My days during my stay in Tokyo won’t be amazing without everyone’s involvement.

The last weekend spent on strolling around Tokyo again, mostly Akihabara and Shinjuku. I really wanted to go to Kyoto at that moment, haha.

And there I off, back to my country. And that concludes my post on my HENNGE GIP Experience. Hope you like it!

HENNGE GIP Experience: Dreams Come True