Weapons & Electronic Systems Engineering Establishment, DRDO - Ministry of Defence

One of the more unique environments I've worked in, and my very first internship ever.

WESEE sits under the Indian Navy, and the nature of the work meant no internet, restricted resources, and a pretty steep learning curve from day one.

My work here was centred around building secure communication applications using QtCreator. The core idea was straightforward: real-time data exchange between systems over UDP and TCP/IP, with SQLite handling secure offline storage on the backend.

I also built out functionality to remotely control receiver actions based on incoming commands, which meant the communication layer had to be reliable and the control logic had to be tight.

What made it interesting wasn't just the technical side. It was figuring things out in an environment where you genuinely couldn't look things up on the fly. No Stack Overflow, no quick Google searches.

You had to think more carefully, read more documentation upfront, and lean on first principles a lot more than usual. It pushed me to actually understand what I was building rather than just making it work.

This was aided by the fact that I couldn't even take my work home, as was the nature of the institution. Confidentiality needs security at the risk of convenience and accessibility.

Integrating custom functionality into existing, actively used software was probably the part I learned the most from. You can't break what's already running in production, ESPECIALLY not in a defence setup.

That kind of constraint forces, nay demands, a certain discipline around how you write and test code and I am so grateful that this was my first actual hands-on experience into the field of software development.

I learnt a lot about dealing with sensitive systems here, and I try to keep myself in touch with this foundation which is becoming ever so important in today's AI-Agentic first world where code has become cheap and performance, security and robustness are an afterthought.

Overall, a solid exposure to systems-level work in a high-stakes, low-resource environment. It shaped a lot of how I approach problems where the margin for error is small.

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