# Spotlight on Engineering: Akshay Bist

**You're a Developer at Postman. What would you say ... you do here?**> *A bit of this and a bit of that. I’ve worked on a bunch of different things here at Postman. Some of them are:*- *The initial analytics and centralized logging infrastructure at Postman*
> - *The [API documentation service](https://learning.postman.com/docs/postman/api-documentation/documenting-your-api/)*
> - *The [Postman API](https://learning.postman.com/docs/postman/postman-api/intro-api/)*
>  
>  *These days I work on our user authentication and permission services. I also dabble in ops and maintain some of our internal packages used across multiple services.*

 **I've heard that you were Postman's FIRST engineering hire way back in 2015. How did you get started working at Postman?**> *I had used Postman at previous jobs and thought it was a pretty nifty tool. I was never a power user, but appreciated that it made testing API calls much easier.* *When I was looking for a new job I saw that Postman was looking for a backend developer and I applied, mostly out of curiosity as I was wondering what work did a REST client have for a backend developer. After I found out what Postman was trying to accomplish, and after seeing how smart the people there were, I really wanted to work for Postman. Luckily I got an offer :)*

 **What tech do you get to work with?**> *Postman runs on JavaScript. We use it almost everywhere we can.* *For our backend services we use a Node.js framework called Sails.js, which is a very opinionated wrapper around Express and comes with batteries included. We use MySQL as our datastore, and Redis sessions/caching, Nginx as a reverse proxy, and Docker for containerization.* *We run on AWS and try to use managed services wherever we can. We also dog food a lot, and try to build Postman using Postman. An example of this would be the recently released [**Create New**](https://blog.postman.com/2017/10/10/create-collections-documentation-and-more-with-postmans-new-button/) flows, which were built using Postman monitors and mocks.* *Personally, I use a Dell XPS 13 9360 Developer Edition running Ubuntu 16.04. I’m the only developer at Postman who doesn’t use a Mac and the only person here who runs Linux.*

 **What’s something cool you’ve worked on recently?** > *Right now I’m working on bringing reliable interservice communication to Postman. We have a lot of microservices and communicating between them has become a pain. So we have architected a system that uses SQS, MySQL, and couple of small node scripts to provide reliable interservice messaging.*

 **What is one thing everyone should know about the Postman app?**> *Two features that make my life a lot easier are the ability to [star collections](https://learning.postman.com/docs/postman/collections/managing-collections/#favoriting-a-collection) so that they show up at the top of the collections list and the [two pane view](https://learning.postman.com/docs/getting-started/basics/navigating-postman/). The two pane view is really helpful when exploring an API, especially when you want to look at the request body and the response together.*

 **Any other Life Pro Tips you want to share with the Postman community?**> *Audio books are the best thing since sliced bread.* *Let me explain. I have a tendency to be lazy. And because I’m lazy, a lot of my house chores tend not to get done. Also, I get distracted quite easily and it is one of the reasons I have a huge, ever increasing pile of unread books. So my house chores weren’t being done and my books were lying unread, and that made me sad :(* *One day I realized that my chores got done when I’d be on long phone calls. So I thought I’d give audio books a shot and try and kill two birds with one stone. And it worked!*  *These days I wake up, fire up an Audible and start listening to an audio book and get on with my chores. Also, I cook breakfast more often and instead of eating it in front of my computer, I eat it at the table. It’s a nice way to start the day, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something soon after waking up.*

 **Lastly, what is something we don’t know about you?**> *I have a fictional universe in my head which contains all my favorite science fiction and fantasy worlds in one single universe.* *Ever since I was little, reading a book or watching a movie was never enough for me. I needed to be in the story as a main character. This would involve a backstory for my character and how he fits into the story. I also needed the world to have some reasonable scientific explanation for any magic/supernatural phenomena.* *The Void Trilogy, by Peter F. Hamilton gave me an idea of how all these different worlds could co-exist, with a consistent scientific explanation for any magic, and a single backstory for my character. The Void Trilogy is centered around this weird artifact at the center of the galaxy left by a long gone sentient species. It is a universe of its own, which sentient beings can telepathically mould reality to their liking and can even reset it to a time in the past.* *I use this to power my fictional universe and explain away all the magic in it.*

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