I'm Basava Kolagani, a first-year Masters student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who worked as an intern on the Distributed Storage and Transactions team at Yugabyte, a company that has developed a PostgreSQL-compatible, distributed SQL database. During my 13-week internship, I was amazed by the quality of the code and had the opportunity to work on two tasks that contributed to enhancing the performance of YugabyteDB, persisting Raft log entries asynchronously and expediting the bootstrapping of new nodes. I collaborated closely with my manager and mentor, receiving continuous feedback and guidance throughout the project. The entire interview process was seamless and fast, and I appreciated the opportunity to present my approach at design review sessions and receive suggestions from engineers. Overall, my internship has been awesome, and I would highly recommend Yugabyte and YugabyteDB as a great place to learn, contribute, and have fun.