Raunak, a master’s student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, interned as a Software Engineer at LanceDB, a San Francisco-based startup focused on multimodal data storage and retrieval. During the internship, Raunak worked extensively with the open-source file format Lance, which is built on Apache Arrow with a Rust codebase and a Python API. He focused on implementing compressive encodings, such as dictionary and fixed-size binary encodings, to improve data compression and read times, achieving significant performance enhancements on datasets like TPCH. Raunak also contributed to optimizing struct encoding for faster random access and added a scalar bitmap index for efficient data querying. His work involved benchmarking low-level Rust code, identifying bottlenecks, and utilizing zero-copy operations. He enjoyed contributing to an open-source project where community collaboration led to further optimizations and bug fixes. The internship was a rewarding experience that enriched his technical skills and provided insights into the tech startup environment, setting the stage for his final year at UIUC and future endeavors in the tech industry.