Colophon

Aug 2012, updated May 2022

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 build programming tools at Buf. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can send me an email; I’m also on Twitter, 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 decided to pursue a career in software. I spent a few years as a full-stack web engineer at an enterprise software startup, worked for a few years on Uber’s core infrastructure, started my own venture-backed company, and briefly worked at Microsoft on Azure. These days, I build better tools for Protocol Buffers at Buf. I remain convinced that programming is the best job on Earth.