Atul Mishra

Early Curiosity and First Steps

My journey into technology began during my master’s degree when I started freelancing alongside my university studies. My first encounter with code was through HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, which I used to create a responsive website that measured stress levels using psychological tests. It was a small university project, but it sparked my curiosity about how technology could make ideas come to life.

That interest gradually grew toward the world of computer networking, where I became fascinated by how bits and binaries move across interconnected systems. I decided to major in networking and moved from understanding basic data communication to exploring complex network architectures and security concepts.

From Campus Labs to Real-World Networks

While completing my degree, I also collaborated with several freelancing teams on machine learning projects, where I worked on building and tuning predictive models using regression, decision trees, gradient boosting, and neural networks. These early projects helped me strengthen my technical skills and taught me how to communicate ideas clearly while working with diverse teams.

After graduating, I entered the networking industry, where I finally saw how theory connects to real-world scale. I worked with data centers such as ASX, NextDC, and Equinix, gaining hands-on experience with Cisco, Juniper, and Fortigate devices. I began as a Layer-1 engineer, handling cable patching and live connection management, and within a year and a half moved into Layer-3 routing and switching roles.

My day-to-day work included designing fiber-optic networks, deploying Cisco SD-WAN solutions, and maintaining high-availability environments. I also ensured network performance and security compliance following ITIL standards. Along the way, I earned my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) in 2023 and CompTIA Security+ in 2024, which helped me deepen my understanding of secure, scalable infrastructure.

Bridging Networks and Intelligence

As I gained experience in networking, my curiosity shifted toward cloud computing and artificial intelligence. I wanted to understand how modern infrastructure works beneath the surface and how AI could make systems more adaptive and efficient.

I started learning about cloud architecture and began experimenting with AI projects in my spare time. Some of the projects I worked on include:

• A Multimodal AI Chatbot and Trip Planner Agent that uses RAG, LangChain, Gemini, and PostgreSQL to handle multilingual and context-aware queries.
• A Vision Event Recognition System built with FastVLM and Ollama models, improving event detection accuracy to 92% on custom datasets.
• An AI-powered image generator integrated into a mass mailing agent, which increased engagement by 35%.
• A time-series forecasting pipeline using LSTM and XGBoost, improving accuracy by 25% on real-world datasets.

These projects helped me connect my networking background with AI, combining scalability, automation, and intelligence into one ecosystem.

Freelancing Experience and Growth

Over time, I worked with third-party freelancing teams and clients on AI and data-driven projects. My role often involved designing end-to-end AI pipelines, ensuring Responsible AI compliance, and using model-explainability tools such as SHAP to make algorithms more transparent.

Through these collaborations, I built automated training and evaluation workflows that reduced retraining time by 30% and improved prediction accuracy by around 28%. These experiences helped me balance research exploration with production reliability and taught me how to design systems that are both intelligent and dependable.

Beyond Technology

Outside of work, I’m a sports and gym enthusiast. Competing on the field has taught me discipline, focus, and teamwork, which I try to bring into everything I build.

To be honest, for a long time I wasn’t very good at promoting my work. I preferred building things quietly in the background and letting the results speak for themselves. This website is my way of changing that. It’s a space where I can share what I’ve learned, the projects I’ve built, and the ideas that keep me inspired.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope you enjoy exploring my projects as much as I enjoyed creating them.