The view from our “office” deck in Kamakura, Japan.
TL;DR: We have an opening for our Open Source Summer Internship 2015 program.
The Intern
Early in 2014, Emily, a Computer Science major from an Ivy League University applied for our Summer Internship.
She wanted to spend her summer in Japan, and work at a foreigner-operated startup. Her knowledge of functional programming, UNIX, and the Japanese language (she was fluent, we’re not) made her a perfect fit for our company.
After Skype interviews and many email exchanges, a date was decided; Emily would be in Japan at the end of May.
The entire hiring process took a little over one week.
This was actually our first somewhat official hire, and first intern. We were stoked!
The Offer
At the time of hiring, we were still a tiny startup (we still are) so our funds were quite low. We subsidized her living costs and a few other things:
This was really all we could afford, or barely - it amounted to roughly ¥200,000 per month (or ~$2000/mo).
The Work
Our “office” is officially in Tokyo, but my co-founder and I work remotely most of the time. This was our go-to work space for the entire summer:
It’s a very inspiring and cool co-working space with a beach right across the street.
By the end of Emily’s internship, she had helped us write a very important tool for Jidoteki, using a purely functional approach with 100% test coverage. She learned all the aspects of working on open source projects, Ruby, documentation, unit testing, continuous integration, pull requests, proper git commit messages, issues, best practices and collaborating on a distributed team with other developers.
She also had the chance to learn about all things virtualization - our specialty - and The Startup Life. We invited her to some investor meetings, introduced her to other startups and did our best to prepare her for the future.
Enjoy Life
Our pace is a bit slow, so we don’t believe in overwork, stress, and things which aren’t healthy. It was definitely a working summer for our intern, but we made sure she could fully enjoy her weeknights, weekends, birthday and public holidays.
Your future desk?
We even had “remote work” days where it was totally fine to work from home, pantaloons optional (I can’t confirm this).
The Microsoft Story
We offered Emily the chance to return to Japan this summer, and work for us on a paid contract. We can actually afford this now, and we were hoping she could delight us with her presence once again this summer and help us do more cool things.
Unfortunately Microsoft seems to have made one of those ridiculously enticing ($$$) offers that she couldn’t resist, so she’ll intern there next summer.
An Opening
The good news is we now have a new opening for an Open Source Winter Internship for 2015-2016.
This internship will be paid, so if you want to spend some time at the beach in Japan, doing functional programming, learning and working on awesome stuff, and bathing in all the culinary and otaku goodness this country has to offer, then send us your resume!
- Alex