Muhammad Shakir contributed to the DFE-Digital/academies-academisation-api repository by focusing on backend development and code quality improvements using C# and NUnit. He stabilized the Application Creation workflow by refining test assertions, replacing broad equivalence checks with targeted equality logic to reduce false positives and negatives, which enhanced test reliability and release confidence. In a separate effort, he addressed technical debt by cleaning up whitespace inconsistencies, improving code readability and maintainability without altering functionality. His work emphasized clean code practices, robust unit testing, and maintainable backend architecture, supporting safer refactoring and smoother onboarding for future contributors to the codebase.