I’m Akshay Shah, and you’ve landed on my little patch of the web — mazel tov! As a brief introduction, I live in San Francisco and work as an infrastructure and platform engineer. Right now, I’m taking some time off between jobs. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can send me an email; I’m also on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m the kind of person who calls this page the colophon. What can I say? “About Me,” “Meet Akshay,” and “The Happy Homepage for Rainbow Ponies” are just so pedestrian. I like semicolons, parenthetical asides, fountain pens, and suede elbow patches, too. Look on the bright side: despite my snotty East-Coast education, I still don’t own a single pair of Madras shorts.
I’m easily excited — show me something intriguing, and I’ll happily spend weeks reading and experimenting. In the past, I’ve made fountain pen nibs and medieval iron-gall ink, roasted my own coffee beans and opened a small espresso shop, led a cross-country bicycle trip, and mistakenly concocted an underwater blasting compound. Thus far, all lost fingertips have been successfully reattached.
Professionally, I’ve been a public school teacher, an EMT, and a medical student. After finishing medical school in 2011, I moved to California and left medicine for a career in software. Most of my experience is in infrastructure and platform engineering at growing startups, including streaming data infrastructure, service-to-service networking, RPC, and the Go programming language. I remain convinced that programming is the best job on Earth.