I Developer Internship#
With three years of academic studies in Computer Science fundamentals, I pursued a technical internship to apply my skills practically and understand business operations from a developer’s perspective.
II Roles and Responsibility#
I was assigned to the LOOP - ISD - OOCL team (Liner Operation Optimization Project, Information Service Department, Orient Overseas Container Line). As a developer, I practiced agile development, attending daily stand-ups, code reviews, and trainings. I reported progress daily, announced deliverables, hosted regular meetings for key breakthroughs, and defined my project scope with estimated completion times.
III Tasks#
I am assigned a few tasks throughout my three month internship period.
MySQL to MongoDB Migration and Legacy Code Review#
To familiarize with development tools and frameworks, I am assigned with a “warm up” task to migrate remaining tables from MySQL to MongoDB. The task involved schema analysis, translating relational data, code changes, impact analysis, patch script preparation and testing. Initial challenges included setting up DevOps tools and the environment, and learning the Java Spring Boot framework, its concurrency control, microservices, queueing system, and design patterns.
Following migration strategy approval and documentation, patching to UAT environment reveals policy-related issues causing failures due to large document size. After discussions, we agreed to patch new updates while backing up original records, only queried when necessary. This task broadened my understanding of dynamic problem-solving and quick decision-making.
Market Intelligence LLM Proof-of-Concept#
I developed a POC prototype using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks to build an AI model that understood user request, then captures competitor market movements and price data to produce actionable insights for business analysts. After comparing frameworks, AutoGen and LangGraph were shortlisted; AutoGen was chosen for its community support, model options, cost-benefit, and future integration.
Being project lead, I was responsible for framework selection, database adoption (Milvus vector database), architecture design, and delivery commitments, which challenged me to quickly learn unfamiliar tools. I sought advice from the data team proficient in RAG modeling, and paid close attention to agent flow, tool calls, and prompting for optimal bot performance.
The prototype is successful in successfully identifies areas of user queries, extract related chunks from vector database, and response with actionables along with statistic proves.
Internship Project: License Management System#
Alongside my main project, our IT summer interns program also required us to work on a group project in teams of three, and our group is to create the basis for an Automated License Management System. This bot is a part of a broader chatbot initiative and will be deployed for the internal users in OOCL, streamlining the license management process. I designed the RAG architecture and we implemented it with Copilot Studio and Power Apps, these tools are selected for future integration with other centralized AI service bots.
We also designed the schema, created tools, workflows, and constructed a working agent connected to the dataverse table that could answer license related queries, perform scheduled scans, assign licenses, notify admins on low vacancies and update corresponding tables automatically. This system replaced much manual work with AI-driven automation.
IV What I Found Interesting#
OOCL’s strong encouragement to adopt new technologies and promote innovation over conservative practices provided me a fresh perspective on software development evolution and the competitive future of technical landscapes—emphasizing rapid discovery, testing, and sustainable process streamlining.
V Takeaways#
I gained concrete skills in using DevOps tools, new frameworks, agile methodologies, and a growth mindset. The experience reinforced the importance of curiosity and speedy adoption of emerging technologies.
