This was my very first internship, and it's still one of the most unusual places I've worked.

WESEE is the Weapons & Electronic Systems Engineering Establishment, under the Ministry of Defence. It sits under the Indian Navy and works jointly with DRDO, depending on the project. The work meant no internet, limited resources and a steep learning curve from day one.

I built secure communication applications in Qt Creator. They exchanged data between systems in real time over UDP and TCP/IP, and stored it offline in SQLite. I also built remote control of the receiver, driven by incoming commands, so the communication layer had to be reliable and the control logic had to be tight.

The tech was only half of it. The hard part was working somewhere you couldn't look anything up. No Stack Overflow, no quick Google searches. I had to read the documentation properly up front and reason from first principles. That forced me to understand what I was building instead of just making it work.

I couldn't even take my work home. When confidentiality comes first, convenience comes last.

I learnt the most from adding custom functionality to software that was already in active use. You can't break what's already running, ESPECIALLY not in a defence setup. That constraint forces, nay demands, discipline in how you write and test code, and I'm grateful this was my first hands-on experience in software development.

I try to stay close to that foundation, maybe more now than ever. In today's agent-first world, code is cheap, and performance, security and reliability too often become an afterthought. Working on sensitive systems with few resources and a tiny margin for error shaped how I approach problems today.

Here's my certificate if you'd like to take a look!