Software Engineering

Internship Experience
at Postman
Vinit Shahdeo · Follow
16 min read · Sep 16, 2019

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What it’s like to intern as a Software Engineer

at Postman
When I was in the second year of
engineering, I heard from my college
seniors that Postman is the most popular
API testing tool they used for their final
year capstone project.

Like hundreds of other fellow undergrads,

I started exploring for the opportunities at
Postman. Then I didn’t know that it’s an
Indian Company. I did research about the
company and was glad to see that all the
three founders are from India. I applied
for an Internship and I was lucky enough
to have cracked the Interview and had a
six months Internship opportunity.

Interning at Postman was an enriching

experience and made me appreciate how
Abhinav’s side project has become one of
the best known developer-first companies
in the world. As I look back on my past six
months, I cannot believe how much I have
grown personally, technically and
professionally.

Here, I’m sharing my experience as a

Software Engineering Intern at Postman.

Let’s start with Postman.

Postman leads the way in the API-first

Universe.
Postman is an API-First Development
Platform. It is used by 8 million developers
and more than 400,000 companies to
access 130 million APIs every month.
According to a survey, there are 23 million
developers in the World, and one-third of
them are already using Postman to gear up
their development.

I was so excited to work on something that

might have an impact on millions of
developers across the world.

In Short — I lived all the phases of SDLC

I started my internship as a newbie
developer as I had little to no experience
working on any real-time project. I was
asked to build a Postman Collection in the
first week so that I’ll learn the essential
features offered by Postman. And then I
was assigned a project “Integration of
Postman Native Apps with Interceptor”. It
was a long due feature request. The
Interceptor was available for Chrome App
but there was no support for Interceptor
after the Chrome app was deprecated and
Postman has released its native app.

The project was so exciting and

challenging as many were waiting for
Interceptor
Open in app
to be released. Sign up Sign in

It began with understanding the existing

behaviour of the Chrome App and then I
designed the workflow and finally started
coding for the same. I must say, I lived all
the phases from conceptualization to
delivery of the feature to the end-users.

A little context about my project, which you

can skip :p

Making API calls in the context of the

browser’s session is a common use case.
This feature is available for Postman
Chrome App using Interceptor Chrome
Extension. As Postman Chrome App is
deprecated now, I have integrated
Interceptor for Postman Native App to
support two major features:

• Capturing browser cookies to make

authenticated calls from Postman App
• Capturing HTTP requests from the browser
and saving them to Postman’s History or
Collection

Click here to learn more.

Team
The team is very supportive. Anyone can
go to anyone’s desk and ask anything.
Discussing with different people within
the team/organization helps to develop
new aspects of the same problem that you
might have not even considered. No
doubts are small or big, doubts are doubts
here. They’ve also helped me in improving
the quality of the code I wrote by following
best practices and standards to ensure
better performance and scalability.

Product Ops Team

I could not have asked for a better set of

people to work with. Right from my super
cool Manager to extremely talented
colleagues, it is fun to learn, work and grow.

Mentorship: Smart people everywhere

The office is full of some of the greatest
tech brains. I’ve met some of the most
hard-working people, some of the super
talented people, and some of the kindest
people under one roof. I must say
everyone here is best at what she/he does.

You won’t even feel that you’re a noob or so

because you’ll be responsible for your
domain within your squad as Postman
follows Domain Driven Design principles.

I remember my mentor told me “Spend 15

mins whenever wherever you’re stuck! Don’t
just copy and paste the code from
StackOverflow if you find it. Learn the
logic/concept behind the code before you paste
it.”

Noone teaches/trains you here but they

make you learn by yourself. If you ask for
help you’d get it, but don’t expect any
spoon-feeding.

Very strict code review

The code review was the toughest part.
Writing code takes lesser time than
addressing the comments on PR. Even if a
single line of code is modified it must be
reviewed by any of the team members
before it goes to production or beta.

Each and every line of my code was read

by my manager. I must say he has an eagle
eye, he used to point out a mistake
which is too small to notice.

For software that is being used by millions

of users, the code needed to be as
optimized as possible. Even a single
unnecessary instruction has to be
carefully pruned from the code before it is
pushed to the master branch.

I still remember when my first PR got

approved and merged!
Knowing the fact that the feature you’re
working on is rolled out to the end-users, it’s
a moment of pride to have your code deployed
in production. And the moment of pride keeps
changing as I grow with the Postman.

Flat hierarchy
The word ‘Hierarchy’ doesn’t exist in
Postman’s Dictionary. You can speak up,
go up to anyone’s desk. Noone and nothing
is gonna stop you. For me, I work with one
of the Co-Founders, Abhijit Kane. He is so
down to earth, helpful and generous I
never felt that he was too senior to me. I
learn a lot from his modesty.

Interns are full-time employees with Intern

title
People treat you like a Full-Time Employee
in the office so there is no difference
between an Intern and FTE. This
experience is really awesome. You get to
be part of the Standups, all-hands
meetings and you are subjected to the
same treatment as the FTEs.

Demo Days
Wednesdays are #demodays!

Demo days have been great to share what gets

done and what is shipping or has shipped.

Postman has been successfully using

demo days as a way of inter-team
collaboration for a few years now. It is
useful for the cross-pollination of ideas
and information. Everyone is supposed to
present their work in front of the team.
The people from San Fransico HQ and
other remote offices join online for demo
days.

The first day of the demo that I attended

was so informative. I listened to everyone
talk and I was wondering what they were
talking about. They’ve presented
something beyond my knowledge.

Demo Area

I remember my first demo which I have

given for the first collection made by me. I
was so nervous to talk to everyone who
was quite experienced than me, but when
I began giving the demo, the way the
individuals who were sitting in front of me
listened to me made me feel confident.
Everyone was listening to my words as I
have been talking about the next big
feature of Postman, I felt.

Strict deadlines
Deadlines are important inside the
company. Everyone is supposed to finish
their assigned tasks within the deadline
unless there’s any blocker. Individuals
should be answerable to their manager if
they’re failing to meet their deadlines.

I remember my mentor telling me that my

code could impact 8 million users at a
moment. One day delay, there’s going to be a
delay for 8 M users.

Challenging projects
As I heard from my seniors, most of the
time interns are assigned a very small task
that might not be of immediate concern to
the organization, but here I got a chance to
work for a feature request by users.

I remember the first day I was told that every

single line of code written by me will go to
production someday. You have to live up to
the expectations of millions of developers
across the globe who use Postman to power
their APIs.

I worked on Interceptor Support for Postman

Native Apps for which users were waiting
for long. Implementing the flow to sync
the browser cookies from Interceptor to
the app was so challenging. It required a
way to communicate between the Postman
App and Interceptor.

For the first iteration, I exposed a

command-line based API and later on the
UI for the same is shipped.

Flexible work schedule

Employees can come in late, work from
home, or leave early if they want to.

Isn’t it so good if one is allowed to come to the

office at 11 AM, and one can continue
staying up late and not waking up early?

I was lucky that I wasn’t supposed to enter

the office at 9 AM. Yes, I can stay up till 3
AM binge-watching a series on Netflix like
I did during college days.

Ownership
At Postman, everyone is expected to
figure out things on their own and is
responsible for e2e delivery of the
product. Being through all the phases of
the development life cycle from design till
maintenance gives full context about the
project, one is working on.

I was given a fairly challenging project,

and this was my first full-blown Software
Design project. Although I had a mentor I
was expected and even encouraged to have
full ownership of my project. Right from
the beginning of my internship, I was
encouraged by my manager to make
decisions on my own and proceed with
solving the issues. He gave me complete
freedom to make changes in the codebase.
With great freedom, comes great
responsibility. There have been situations
when I was ambiguous about choosing the
right path. But as time went on, I got used
to that. Thanks to Postman, I improved my
decision-making skills.

I was supposed to write RFCs, RCA for

reported bugs, documentation for APIs
and test plans. By doing this, I get to learn
business logic. I even took part in our
GitHub Issues thread conversations and
interact with users via Discourse.

Monthly Meetups
For monthly meetups, we’ve people
joining from companies like Atlassian,
Cisco, Adobe, etc. I got to interact with
people outside my company and this
helped me build my connections.

The best part about meetups is goodies. I

love collecting stickers.

It’s not the collection, it’s the journey!

Cooper — Our Chief Happiness Officer

I remember my first day Cooper suddenly
started barking at me, I was so scared,
Goutam, our office manager came to me
and asked me to show some love to Cooper
and he became friendly to me within a
couple of minutes. So kind, Cooper!

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand

words. These pictures will tell you how
cool is our endearing Cooper!

Adorable

Cooper

Cooper’s Birthday Celebration

Books seem too boring to Cooper

Most incredible perk: Cuddle from Cooper

Such an innocent look!

Cooper being part of standups

Seems like Cooper saying “Stop playing FIFA, get

back to your work”

Perks bring Fun at Work

Apart from various reasons, the following
perks also made me say — “I’m not enjoying
at work, I’m enjoying my work!”

Turning Coffee into Code — There are

free coffee vending machines inside
the office. I must admit that coffee
breaks in between my office hours
helped me to increase my productivity.