Hi, I’m Muqi, a second-year Computer Science and Maths student, and this summer I joined the Information Services Group (ISG) as an IT System Administrator and Developer Intern. I came in expecting to spend most of my time coding, but I quickly realised there was much more to the job. I found myself in meetings with people from across the University, hearing how they manage servers and systems at a scale I had never imagined. At first, I thought the meetings were great just because they were new, but soon the conversations went so deep and technical that I honestly did not follow a lot of what was said. Even so, sitting in and listening turned out to be really valuable, those meetings often sparked the conversations that taught me the most.
My main project was improving the LCFG server web app by introducing new features and making it faster. For context, Local Configuration System (LCFG) was developed 30 years ago in our University and is still used to centrally manage lots of servers and machines, so the web app is a very useful tool for system administrators. One of the big features I worked on was implementing a caching system. Basically, when users wanted to search a package, a slow processing of the all the data was triggered. With a cache, the slow data processing was moved to the background, results were stored in the database (cache), and when someone searched a package, the data should already be in the cache, making the process faster. The challenge was keeping the cache consistent when files were constantly changing, and my early attempts didn’t work out. I could see myself being stuck on it for weeks. Then, after a meeting, I had a casual two-minute chat with a Computing Officer from Engineering. I explained the problem, and he immediately mentioned a tool I had never heard of: inotify. That single suggestion solved everything. What could have been weeks of frustration was solved in minutes, and the result was searches running 12x faster (from 6 seconds down to half a second).
Looking back, one of the things that surprised me most was how much I learned outside of coding. At first, I found the meetings really interesting because it was all new. Later, when the discussions got very technical, I often didn’t understand some of what it was being said. But showing up still mattered. Those meetings helped me pick up knowledge bit by bit, and even led to conversations like the one that solved my caching problem. It made me realise how valuable it is to talk to more experienced colleagues, sometimes a short chat can save you days of work. This internship also gave me a feel for working in a professional environment, from joining meetings to presenting my work, and it’s made me more confident about the next steps in both my studies and career. My advice to future interns would be: don’t be afraid to ask questions or start a casual conversation, you never know what you might learn.
