Iliana Hadzhiatanasova contributed to both the rails/rails and Shopify/rails repositories over a two-month period, focusing on backend infrastructure and API enhancements. She implemented a connection pool optimization for ActiveRecord schema verification in rails/rails, reusing database connections during test schema checks to reduce redundancy and improve performance for multi-database environments. In Shopify/rails, Iliana introduced a customizable content type parameter for HTTP authentication, enabling APIs to return JSON-formatted error messages and standardizing error payloads. Her work leveraged Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and database management skills, demonstrating a thoughtful approach to performance optimization and API reliability without addressing bug fixes.