Spotlight on Engineering: Ankit Muchhala

Muchhala, you’re a Software Developer at Postman. What would you say you do here?

I primarily work on building UIs for our web products. This includes the Postman dashboard, documentation and monitoring. I also work on the backend for our dashboard which talks to all our microservices.

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

I had been using Postman for a couple of years for making small websites and using it for college projects. I absolutely loved it. In my final year, I was looking for an internship for my final degree project.

I came across a job listing on StackOverflow for a software developer at Postman. I sent in a mail asking for an internship opportunity. After a few phone interviews, I was hired as an intern and then started working full time after college. It has been an amazing journey since then.

What tech do you get to work with?

To build UIs, we rely heavily on React and associated libraries like Redux and Redux Sagas. As for the backend, most of our microservices are built using sailsJS. For testing, we use mocha and chai along with libraries like enzyme, sinon and puppeteer. Finally, we use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to serve our applications.

What’s something cool you’ve been working on recently?

Recently, I have been working on building an improved analytics layer for our products. The aim is to build a library which gives us fine-grained events based on interactions, ensuring that it is lightweight and performant.

I also worked on splitting the dashboard single page application to optimize its performance. We made sure that only the necessary files and chunks are fetched from the server and when a new version is deployed, only the relevant files are updated.

What is one feature everyone should know about Postman?

Monitoring is one feature that everyone should be aware of. You can keep a check on your APIs performance and functionality. You can also run constant tests for various interactions with your API, using postman.setNextRequest().

Besides Postman, any dev tool recommendations?

Git. It is an extremely underrated tool.

Anything else we don’t know about you?

I am a foodie. Wherever I travel, my first (and sometimes only) goal is to find good restaurants and eat as many things as I can.

I also draw comic strips – just stick figures and callouts, nothing fancy.