Spotlight on Engineering: Andrew Broz

Joyce

August 11, 2017

You’re a Software Engineer on the Monitors product team at Postman. What would you say … you do here?

I work on the monitoring product for Postman with one other engineer (James). It’s been engaging work – the project has involved solving several complex problems on both the front and backend. It’s also been just the two of us – monitoring is a two-person team right now.

You and James work on Monitors all day, every day. Is it true that you also go on vacations together?

It’s true. We’ve been to the Grand Canyon, Vegas, and Goa, and we’re going to Agra in a few weeks. 

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

I got a math degree and served in the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Ukraine before becoming a software engineer. Programming was a hobby I picked up after university – I really enjoyed studying computer science fundamentals because it involved so much discrete math. My spare time activity eventually led to a job in the software industry, and I haven’t looked back since.

I found out about the opportunity to work at Postman through a colleague, James, who found out about an opening with the company on Twitter. Originally, I think that Postman had plans to hire engineers in its home base of Bengaluru, India, not two lone engineers in Austin, Texas. Now we both work at Postman. We were hires 10 and 11 for the company, and for a while we were the only US employees.

Since then, Postman has expanded in the US and opened an office in San Francisco. I moved to the city two months ago to be closer to the now extensive US team. It sure ain’t Texas, but it’s been great to be in an office with windows! And more than two people.

What tech do you get to work with?

We use Node.js for the monitoring backend codebase. We also use MySQL, Redis, Docker, and AWS to deploy the service. The frontend is a SPA written in React with Redux.

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

Monitoring is pretty cool, but I’ve already talked a bit about that. My most recent side project related to Postman was a demo Postman collection that picks places for our team to have lunch. It was written to show off some of the things that you can do with collections and monitors, but we actually use it at the office. It’s also pretty well documented and shows off some neat tricks that could be used by other teams with more complicated collections.

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

You can get code reuse in Postman with Postman variables and eval! This is a bit of a hack, but it totally works. Check out Tip #5 from James’ recent blog post, or you can see the same pattern applied in the code of the Lunch Picker collection.

What is something we don’t know about you?

I learned Russian in the Peace Corps and learned Ukrainian when I got back to the states. I speak both languages pretty well now.

I’m also a nature nerd, and especially love botany and mycology. I have a friend in Texas from my last job who still gives me a hard time to this day because I criticized the plant descriptions in Game of Thrones.

These days, a good weekend for me might be going on a day hike with my wife or flying a stunt kite on the beach.

Want to join the team at Postman? We’re hiring!