Shivam Mishra

I went to an ICSE school that taught LOGO before it taught anything else. Then QBasic. Then Java. The turtle at the top of this page is that first language, still drawing circles.

My dad worked overseas, which is how a computer turned up at home earlier than it otherwise would have, and how I was on Skype back when a video call still felt like a trick. I spent that decade breaking the thing: corrupting Windows, reinstalling it, carving up partitions, and playing an unreasonable number of Flash games in between. Later the same instinct moved to phones and I lost entire months to XDA, flashing custom ROMs onto devices that did not always survive the experience.

At university I could pair a major with a minor, so I took full stack web development and literature. That is how I spent one half of my week on code and the other on Agatha Christie and Ted Hughes' Snowdrop, and I have never thought of the two as separate skills since.

The consoles arrived in their own haphazard order. First a NES clone that took cartridges, loaded with a bootleg Mario, Contra and a duck hunting game. Then a Wii clone. Then a PS2, which is still the best machine I have owned. There is a PS5 under the TV now and I use it for the same thing I always did: stories.

Java took me to Udacity, Udacity took me to Android, and I kept walking from there. Frontend, then backend, then React Native once the apps had to exist on both stores. Right now I'm at InsideIIM | AltUni Labs. Before that I spent two years at Terribly Tiny Tales rebuilding their learning platform and mobile app from the ground up.

A VAPT audit is what pushed me properly into DevOps. I moved everything off Supabase onto AWS, which fixed the architectural problems underneath the product, and the application came out of the audit with no high or critical findings. The part I'm actually proud of is the bill: all of that AWS infrastructure still costs less than the $599-a-month plan Supabase wanted us on before it would hand over GDPR documents. I wrote the whole migration up.

Most of my time now goes to AI recruitment pipelines: CV parsing, AI-run tests, AI interviews. That is LangChain for the reasoning and LiveKit for the realtime side. Working that close to LiveKit meant reading its internals, which is how I ended up with PRs in it.

The part I chase is the moment something ships and simply works. Shipping on its own isn't the point. It has to run without bugs and it has to be secure, or it doesn't count.

I read science fiction because it asks better questions than it answers, and philosophy for the same reason. Subtitles have never bothered me, so I watch whatever is good in whatever language it was made in.

Frieren and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood are the two I keep going back to. Both are about time, the length of a journey, and paying honestly for what you take, which is more or less the only moral I trust.

I'm also a quiz person. iQuiz on an iPod Classic got an unreasonable amount of use, I won enough of them at school to keep taking them seriously, and I still go back to Tom Scott's old quiz videos, the ones on the other channel, because that format is close to perfect.

I'm not chasing a title. I want balance, some peace, and an ordinary kind of happy. Siddhartha, the Tao Te Ching and a stubborn fondness for Diogenes all point the same direction: want less, pay attention, do the work in front of you.

Which is why the drawing up there is what it is. One instruction at a time, a circle that closes, and a flower that only shows up because the turtle kept walking.