A week in Hanoi, from the inside

People ask me what a Wu.Ship is really like, and the honest answer is that it is not one thing. It is a lot of small things stacked into a week that ends up feeling enormous. So here is a real one.

Monday

Standup is at nine, on the floor, in English and Vietnamese at the same time. I pitch a small change to our onboarding flow. By lunch it is assigned to me. Not reviewed for a month. Assigned. I spend the afternoon learning the codebase from an engineer named Linh who is patient with my questions and faster than anyone I have worked with.

Tuesday

I ship the change. Forty thousand people will see it this week. I read that number twice. At home I had built things for class. Here I built something for people I will never meet, and it went live the same week I thought of it.

Wednesday

The founder sits down across from me at lunch and asks what I would change about the product if it were mine. I had two days of context and a list of opinions. He took notes. That does not happen on campus.

Thursday

Our city guide, who checks in on the whole cohort, takes a few of us to a place we never would have found. We are the only people there who are not from Hanoi. We talk about work, about home, about how strange and good it is to be exactly here.

Friday

The night market. Six of us from six different schools, one group chat, arguing about where to eat. This is the part no one warns you about. You come for the internship. You leave with a network that spans countries and a set of friends who saw you grow up a little.

That is a week. Multiply it by eight and you start to understand why people come home different.