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Spotlight on Engineering: Vivek Thuravupala

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You’re a Software Engineer at Postman. What would you say … you do here?

I do all of the eating and talking at Postman, everyone else is surprisingly quiet…and hungry.

Sometimes though, I work on the various web-based products we have. I’ve worked on the entire stack for our post-login website, documentation service, Run in Postman button, and our internal web style guide. I also used to handle our marketing website.

On another note, I have a collection of caps, which I wear on days when I feel like I’m getting too old for this.

You’ve worked at Postman for 2 years. How did you get started working at Postman?

Ahem, okay. Well, I had another gig before this, something that a few friends and I started up. After about a year of trying to make it work, almost 6 months with no income and the sudden realization that we weren’t going to hit market, I decided to start looking for a new job.

That’s when I heard that Postman was looking for a web dev. I had heard about the team from a friend of mine, and I had also talked to a related startup (TeliportMe) about a possible job opportunity before. So I was familiar with how the product and team had grown over time.

I dropped in one day, and then another, then joined the next week. Everything has been shipshape since then.

What tech do you get to work with?

Vanilla JS, CSS, HTML, React, Redux, SCSS, AWS, Docker, Beanstalk, S3, Cloudfront, Nginx, SailsJS.

Those are all the shiny terms I can think of right now.

What’s something cool you’ve worked on recently?

Oooh, well, we’ve been working for a while on a unified web interface for Postman. Because Postman kinda grew organically, the various products live on their own subdomains and have minor inconsistencies as far as the UI goes. We recently released a unified Dashboard interface which smushes everything into one.

What is one thing everyone should know about the Postman app?

There are stand-alone apps!

So many people are still on the Chrome apps, even though it’s been more than a year since the Mac, Windows & Linux apps came out.

Any cool side projects you’ve been working on?

Outside of work…well, I get a ton of ideas but I usually forget to pursue any of them. I’m working with a few friends on a tool which helps you write nginx configs though.

Nginx configs are relatively straightforward, but writing a config usually means you end up using `nginx -t` a lot, and then manually testing out the routes yourself. Or something like that. I’m thinking we can change that, by building a UI which can not only make configuration management easy, but also helps teach people about the correct usage of various nginx directives.

Besides Postman, are there any other dev tools that you love?

I spend all my time inside Sublime or iTerm. That’s about it. lol.

What is something we don’t know about you?

I ate an iguana once. It was super bony. And I hate bones.

Also, we just rescued 3 kittens earlier this year, kibbeh, sushi, and taco, all named after our favorite foods.


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