About
I'm Elena Shah, a backend engineer based in Manchester.
I've spent the last 9 years building APIs and data-heavy services that need to stay up, most recently on a small team where I look after caching and API versioning. Before that I bounced between agencies, startups and one very large company.
I started Elena on Software in 2025 as a place to think out loud. Most posts begin as notes from real projects: something broke, I fixed it, and I wanted to remember why. If one of them saves you an afternoon, it was worth writing.
What I write about
- Schema migrations
- Observability
- Rate limiting
- Background jobs
- Idempotency
Get in touch
The best way to reach me is by email at hello@us1001qz.jp2haozu-naookg-okak.cc. I read everything, even if replies take a little while. You can also find me on GitHub and Mastodon.
Opinions here are my own and not those of any employer, past or present.