Home | Madan Thangavelu

Hello, I am Madan Thangavelu.

If you are new here, check out some of my popular articles. I have written about my larger multi-year technical projects on Uber engineering blog -- Uber's API platform, message streaming platform, and rebuilding Uber's dispatching system. While I am not an active speaker, you may enjoy my conference decks on developing for cellular experiences and achieving reliability with API gateways.

Featured

Are your storytelling skills limiting your engineering career?

Are you a no-name engineer? your work feels repetitive and boring? No promotion yet? and you feel that no one cares about your project? these are good indicators that your story telling skills need an uplift.

Tech Talks

May 4, 2025

Vibe coding @ CoCreate Conference

At the 2025 Design CoCreate Conference in San Francisco—a premier gathering of designers, creators, and founders—I shared a talk titled “Trust the Vibe (Sometimes)”, exploring the future of software development...

January 2, 2022

API Gateway @ Kong Summit

At Kong Summit 2022, I had the privilege of sharing how to uplevel its reliability engineering through strategic use of API gateways. The talk, “How Uber Uplevels Reliability Engineering by...

August 1, 2019

API Gateway @ Kong Summit

At the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) 2019, Asia-Pacific’s largest independent polyglot software conference, I had the opportunity to present a talk titled “Magical User Experiences on Cellular Mobile Networks”,...

All Stories

May 4, 2025

Vibe coding @ CoCreate Conference

At the 2025 Design CoCreate Conference in San Francisco—a premier gathering of designers, creators, and founders—I shared a talk titled “Trust the Vibe (Sometimes)”, exploring the future of software development...

January 2, 2024

Engineering Personas - Innovator, Executor, and Caretaker. What are you?

If you look around your team and observe how each one of them operates, you may be able to broadly bucket them into three personas. This applies to engineers and...

December 14, 2023

Listen more than you speak. The 80:20 rule for great leaders

Listening is not about your hearing; it’s making other people heard.

December 2, 2023

Are you ready to manage other managers?

You have now been managing engineers for two years as a frontline manager. Your team is expanding. It is time to decide whether you are ready to have another manager...

November 29, 2023

Achieve a high close-rate in sell calls with engineers using this simple storytelling 101 technique

A job change is very emotional and usually done in search of specific make-or-break things. Monetary reasons cannot be the only reason someone gets triggered to look for a job....

November 2, 2023

Every successful engineering project deck has these five sections, does yours?

All successful projects have something in common. They communicate their story well across various channels. One such channel is a slide deck; the most successful ones have these five sections....

October 30, 2023

The 5 why method to nail a perfect narrative for your engineering project

Did you write some code today? Fixed some bugs, prevented a future outage, cleaned up dead code, or completed a new feature for the sprint. But why?

October 16, 2023

Are your storytelling skills limiting your engineering career?

Are you a no-name engineer? your work feels repetitive and boring? No promotion yet? and you feel that no one cares about your project? these are good indicators that your...

October 1, 2023

Featured

Are your storytelling skills limiting your engineering career?

Are you a no-name engineer? your work feels repetitive and boring? No promotion yet? and you feel that no one cares about your project? these are good indicators that your story telling skills need an uplift.

Tech Talks

Vibe coding @ CoCreate Conference

At the 2025 Design CoCreate Conference in San Francisco—a premier gathering of designers, creators, and founders—I shared a talk titled “Trust the Vibe (Sometimes)”, exploring the future of software development...

API Gateway @ Kong Summit

At Kong Summit 2022, I had the privilege of sharing how to uplevel its reliability engineering through strategic use of API gateways. The talk, “How Uber Uplevels Reliability Engineering by...

API Gateway @ Kong Summit

At the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) 2019, Asia-Pacific’s largest independent polyglot software conference, I had the opportunity to present a talk titled “Magical User Experiences on Cellular Mobile Networks”,...

All Stories

Vibe coding @ CoCreate Conference

At the 2025 Design CoCreate Conference in San Francisco—a premier gathering of designers, creators, and founders—I shared a talk titled “Trust the Vibe (Sometimes)”, exploring the future of software development...

Engineering Personas - Innovator, Executor, and Caretaker. What are you?

If you look around your team and observe how each one of them operates, you may be able to broadly bucket them into three personas. This applies to engineers and...

Listen more than you speak. The 80:20 rule for great leaders

Listening is not about your hearing; it’s making other people heard.

Are you ready to manage other managers?

You have now been managing engineers for two years as a frontline manager. Your team is expanding. It is time to decide whether you are ready to have another manager...

Achieve a high close-rate in sell calls with engineers using this simple storytelling 101 technique

A job change is very emotional and usually done in search of specific make-or-break things. Monetary reasons cannot be the only reason someone gets triggered to look for a job....

Every successful engineering project deck has these five sections, does yours?

All successful projects have something in common. They communicate their story well across various channels. One such channel is a slide deck; the most successful ones have these five sections....

The 5 why method to nail a perfect narrative for your engineering project

Did you write some code today? Fixed some bugs, prevented a future outage, cleaned up dead code, or completed a new feature for the sprint. But why?

Are your storytelling skills limiting your engineering career?

Are you a no-name engineer? your work feels repetitive and boring? No promotion yet? and you feel that no one cares about your project? these are good indicators that your...

I became a tech lead two years after graduating - here is why

Leadership is never given, it is only acknowledged after the fact. So, do not wait. Start Leading.