Expedia Internship - Week 2

Week 2 as a SWE Intern at Expedia

As I wrap up my second week as a Software Engineering Intern at Expedia, I’m excited to share the progress I’ve made and the new challenges I’ve encountered. This week was marked by hands-on coding, project kickoff, and a deeper dive into the technologies powering Expedia’s systems. I can’t say much about my project for confidentiality reasons, but I’ll try to cover the basics.

Monday 26/05

I started the week by completing a Spring Boot project I had begun over the weekend. After a few false starts with outdated tutorials and VPN issues, I successfully built a RESTful project using Kotlin, Spring Boot, and SQL (with H2 database).

The highlight of the day was the project meeting where I learned about my project and what I will do, the focus of my internship work. I will be working on a localization service using LLM models to perform translations and linguistic adaptations.

Tuesday 27/05

I had an insightful meeting with my mentor, Walid. We discussed the importance of developing soft skills and networking – a reminder that success in tech isn’t just about coding prowess. We often hear about the importance of work-life balance, and my first week was a clear reminder of why it matters. Working on weekends or staying late into the evening isn’t sustainable — the work will get done either way. If I want to have the time and energy to enjoy my evenings or pursue other activities, I need to respect those boundaries and avoid overextending myself. Besides, I’m currently training towards some personal sports goals — something I’ll share more about in a future post.

Wednesday 28/05

Midweek saw a significant boost in productivity. I completed my environment setup, ran tests, and even submitted my first pull request! I implemented code for parsing CSV files and selecting conversion methods based on file types. Seeing my code pass both unit tests and integration tests was incredibly satisfying.

Friday 30/05

I dedicated Friday to researching Langfuse integration possibilities with the service I’m working on. While I couldn’t find direct Java integration examples, I discovered potential paths through Spring AI and OpenTelemetry dependencies.

I also spent time studying the project’s architecture, particularly the Generative AI block, which seems central to model interactions and requests. This deep dive is preparing me for more substantive contributions in the coming weeks.

End of the week

As I look back on Week 2, I’m proud of the progress I’ve made in understanding Spring Boot, submitting my first PR, and beginning to grasp the complexities of the project. I’m really excited about pursuing this project and seeing how far I can go with it. I really want to make something useful for my team and the clients who will use it.