The first internship, signed off

Taken the evening the first professional engagement closed out — four months of UI/UX and front-end work at LayOver, and the team it was done alongside.A UI/UX design internship at LayOver, running 23 March to 20 July 2025. It was the first professional engagement of the lot, and this photograph is the day it ended.The work ran from research through to production: user research and usability testing on the mobile flows, high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes in Figma, accessibility held as a requirement rather than a pass at the end, and the prototypes translated into responsive React components against the design system the product is built on. Two documents came out of it — a completion certificate and a reference letter — and both are in the certifications wall.What an internship actually teaches is not a tool. It is that the work stops being judged by whether you like it. A design is finished when somebody who has never met you can use it without being told how, and that standard is set by other people, arrives on their schedule, and is not negotiable — which is a different discipline from a personal project you can keep improving until it satisfies you.The record of it is a certificate and a letter. The photograph is the other half: the people it was done with, on the evening the last piece of it was handed over. Both are worth keeping, and only one of them is filed.

Selected work

Saturdays — Food Delivery Platform — A consumer food delivery platform — customer app, restaurant API, rider layer and operator console on one Django backend.
DineGuru — Restaurant POS and Billing System — A restaurant operating system — POS and GST billing, inventory, recipe costing, procurement and tiered analytics on one multi-tenant core.
GovernAI Research Atlas — Open-source platform unifying research papers, repositories and governance resources behind a single semantic vector index.
GovernAI Studio — Interactive training simulator for governance and compliance scenarios, backed by a RAG and LLM inference path.
Content Recommendation Engine — SASRec Sequential Recommender — Transformer-based sequential recommender with automated data pipelines, built as the IIT Ropar capstone project.
AI & IoT Rockfall Prediction — Geological Hazard Detection — Multi-sensor fusion pipeline for real-time geological hazard detection, running inference at the edge on live monitoring data.
Netra — AI Surveillance System — Autonomous person-tracking surveillance on constrained hardware, with real-time detection and an anomaly-scoring dashboard.
AlgoVerse — Data Structure and Algorithm Visualizer — Sorting, graph and tree operations rendered as animated 3D scenes, built to make data structures legible while they run.
IoT Smart Home Automation — Voice Controlled Home Assistant — Voice-activated home controller that interprets natural-language commands and drives devices directly, no fixed grammar.
Adaptive Traffic Light Controller — Verilog FPGA Design — Real-time traffic controller that adjusts signal timing to measured vehicle throughput, written in Verilog and synthesised to FPGA.

Record

National Entrepreneurship Challenge
Visionary Ventures
DevJams '24 — Vellore, Tamil Nadu
An AI major, read in parallel — Rupnagar, Punjab
Bharat’s leading startup summit — Surat, Gujarat
The calibre of the room — Surat, Gujarat
The first internship, signed off
Adaptive traffic control, in silicon
The day the submissions went in — Vellore, Tamil Nadu
Smart India Hackathon 2025
Convocation day at IIT Ropar — Rupnagar, Punjab
One with the grandmaster of computer science at IIT Ropar — Rupnagar, Punjab

Elsewhere

Divyakush Punjabi