Internship at Aspire to Innovate (a2i) Muktopaath, and the design, development, and evaluation of two web-based software systems: Chokh-e-Dekha and Pharmazine

Abstract

My final-year work has two halves, and this report is where they meet. The first half was a three-month internship at the Aspire to Innovate (a2i) Program, on the Muktopaath national e-learning platform. The second was two web-based software systems that I built afterwards, by taking what that internship taught me and putting it to work. This is an internship-based report, written under the Internship Track of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Brac University, and I have tried to write it as exactly that, not as a research thesis dressed up in internship language. The first system, Chokh-e-Dekha, is a civic-issue reporting and accountability platform for urban Bangladesh. Citizens file geo-tagged, photo-evidenced reports of infrastructure problems; administrators get a command centre with Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking; and a Right to Information (RTI) wizard helps a citizen escalate when nothing happens. It is built on Laravel and MySQL. The second system, Pharmazine, is a pharmacy management and point-of-sale (POS) system for small and medium pharmacies. It ties batch- and expiry-aware inventory directly to a fast POS workflow and surrounds it with procurement, multi-branch, and pharmacy-care modules. It is a React and TypeScript single-page application over a FastAPI and PostgreSQL backend, and it is deployed publicly so that it can be demonstrated rather than only described. Instead of an academic research gap, I frame the work around an industry practice gap: real inefficiencies in everyday civic and pharmacy workflows that I understood far better after seeing how a government-scale platform is actually built and run. The report sets out the requirements, the societal and environmental impact, the ethics, the project management, and the economic analysis of both systems; their design alternatives and final architectures; and an honest evaluation that does not hide the parts that are not finished. There is a dedicated chapter that goes back to the internship itself, tracing how each thing I learned there became a specific design choice in one of the two systems. I should also say upfront that both systems are working prototypes, not finished products, and I have tried to be honest throughout the report about what still needs to be done.