My 2026 Internship

I spent my 2026 summer break working for a machinery manufacturing company as a SWE intern. Over the course of the internship, I spent a lot of time honing my technical skills but I also learned so much about the social and political side of full time work in this industry. I wanted to dedicate my first blog post (yay) towards detailing that experience, and providing tips for other students who will be in that position.

So first off, what exactly did I do at my internship?

I was tasked with a few projects, but the most interesting ones were creating a usable database for machine tests and redesigning the system used by sales to prepare orders for engineering.

The former was something I had done many times before, but I had recently taken a course on databases, and was sort of inspired to make sure the system was normalized and efficient even though in reality there wouldn’t be too many tests stored in it. It also had to fit in a flat file system rather than a hosted server (a constraint that I’ll talk about in more detail later), which made the app more difficult to implement than how I had done it in the past.

The latter was extremely difficult for a variety of reasons, but primarily it was an issue that long-standing members of the sales team were more resistant to changing the way things were done. It was hard to please them in a way that made technical sense, and even if a new way was implemented, it was likely that those members would be confused or untrusting. This relates strongly to one of the takeaways I have at the end of this post.

Database Project

Throughout this project, I made a full-stack CRUD app for the company by myself. Technically, it wasn’t hard to implement, but the difficulty came from garnering trust from and building around the customers, which in this case were non-SWE engineers. Previously, my experience building out projects had been in the context of hackathons or coursework where I’m surrounded by other CS students, so it was very eye-opening when I had to explain to my boss what React was.

Because what I was doing was pretty foreign to the other employees, they also weren’t really able to give me information that would have been helpful. I initially asked if they had any server resources that could host a SQL database, and they said no which led me to start working with SQLite on their flat file system. I didn’t find out until I was almost finished that they actually do have a server, and that they would be able to set up a headless Ubuntu VM dedicated to this project! This specific project really showed me how computer science brain-rotted I am, and that not everyone has the specific domain knowledge that I do. It’s pushed me to reevaluate the way I approach users / customers in a way that information and services can be passed efficiently and productively.

System Design Project

This project was tricky. It was something I had never done before, and had the potential for a very large impact on the company I was working for. The problem was that there were too many forms, and no automation. Multiple forms had to be filled out, and one change from the customer meant changing everything all over again. The legacy system was extremely inefficient, and took multiple hours per sale in rewriting data alone. My initial role in this was to automate the form data transfers, but that quickly exploded after learning how complicated and intertwined the entire system was.

After meeting with the sales team numerous times, brainstorming solutions, and even implementing some of the automation for data transfer, I came across the biggest problem with this project. The sales team didn’t want it to change. They were reluctant to try anything new because although their system was complicated, it worked and they trusted it. It became clear to me that this wasn’t really a problem that could be solved; at least not within a summer. The reason I was tasked with this was to make the data from sales clean enough for the engineering team, but it bled into an attempt at solving a problem that nobody really wanted solved. Although this project ultimately didn’t go anywhere, it taught me a lot about the politics of professional environments which is a lesson I will take with me throughout my career. Users are so critical in SWE, and it’s the duty of the developer to take their wants and needs into account when writing software.

Tips for Future Interns

If you somehow managed to get an internship in this market, good job! I wanted to end this post with some final takeaways that might help you make the most of it:

• Take notes on everything you did: You’re going to forget stuff, and at the end of the experience you can have an LLM summarize 100 markdown files of daily logs, and create good resume bullet points as well as identify your progress and things you did throughout the internship.
• Advocate for your ideas: There were multiple instances where my boss shot down my ideas initially because he wasn’t familiar with the technology that I was hoping to use, and he didn’t want to try new things or I just didn’t explain them well. But by pushing my ideas and providing better arguments to why they would work, I was able to convince them that my idea is going to work better, and that resulted in a better time for me because I got to work on stuff I actually enjoyed, and a better result for the company because they now have access to a better tool.
• Don’t let peers demotivate you: It’s easy to see your peers land better opportunities and go down a spiral of “now that I have a worse opportunity I can never catch up”. This was something I went through, and after talking with those peers who got “better” opportunities, their experience was actually about the same as mine even though I was working at a less known local company. It might be harder to land jobs in the future if you don’t have a household name like Amazon or Google on your resume, but it’s honestly the impact you’re able to generate that really matters. Smaller companies typically are going to give you more agency and liberties to create meaningful projects, so take advantage of that, and focus on what you CAN do rather than what your peers are doing.

Summary

In summary, I’m super happy with how my internship went. I was able to build some useful internal tools for the company and got a taste of the full-time developer life. Thank you for reading my first blog post, and stay tuned for more of my thoughts going forward!