Deshant Devkota
Contents
This article is about the software engineer. For payment details, see Pay; for the résumé, see the PDF.
Deshant Devkota is a Nepali software engineer based in Lalitpur, in the Kathmandu valley. He works as a senior full-stack engineer specialising in Node.js, TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL and Amazon Web Services, and has spent most of his career as the sole engineer on production systems in financial technology, the Internet of things, logistics and e-commerce.1
He is best known for the Terminal Management System he architected and built at Nepal Digital Systems for Sikha Tech’s certified point-of-sale devices, which runs on AWS IoT Core and is live at Nabil Bank and Prime Bank, and for the related Card Activation Terminal platform for Smart Choice Technologies.23 Earlier he co-founded DASRAA Technology, where he built a headless MedusaJS store for the skincare brand Aloe Herbals, and he wrote the device-local web interface compiled into WLED firmware for the American lighting company Hypnotik.45
Since 2026 he has worked remotely as the backend and infrastructure engineer for the international cargo platform AgExpress, where he built a delivery pipeline designed around coding agents, and he sells OneTake, a desktop application for video creators that he built alone.67 He also lectures part-time at Vedas College, his alma mater, and is an early adopter of AI-assisted software engineering.
Work
The organizations Deshant Devkota has worked for or founded, the roles he held in each, and what he built in them.
OneTake
Organization · Lalitpur, Nepal · onetakeproject.comDesktop application for video creators, his own product
Founder and sole engineer
In April 2026 Devkota released OneTake, a paid desktop application for video creators. It is an always-on-top overlay for OBS Studio that lets a creator mark and snip mistakes while recording and export a single clean file or an edit decision list, without an external editor. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and is sold as a one-time licence. He designed, built and ships the product alone: an Electron and React application, a Next.js marketing and licensing site on Vercel, Google sign-in through Supabase, Paddle Billing for licences, installers hosted on Amazon S3, and a shared UI package…
- OneTake — Active · 2026 – present. Always-on-top overlay for OBS Studio that snips mistakes while recording and exports one clean file or an EDL. Windows, macOS and Linux; one-time licence.
AgExpress Cargo
Client · Hong Kong · ag.expressInternational cargo and freight platform serving the Nepali diaspora
Software engineer (freelance)
Since February 2026 Devkota has worked remotely as a freelance backend and infrastructure engineer for AgExpress Cargo, an international cargo and freight platform serving 92 branches in six countries. He built its continuous-integration and deployment pipeline from scratch, using GitHub Actions to publish Docker images to Google Artifact Registry through Workload Identity Federation and deploying them with Docker Compose behind Nginx. He integrated United States customs Automated Manifest System (AMS) filing through the IBC PacTrak API, and delivered partner and lead management with a…
- AgExpress operations platform — Active · 2026 – present. Backend, staff dashboard and delivery pipeline for a Hong Kong-based logistics company serving the Nepali diaspora: US customs AMS filing, PostGIS territory routing for partner onboarding, per-PR preview environments, approval-gated production deploys.
Nepal Digital Systems
Employer · Kathmandu, NepalEmbedded-systems and IoT company
Senior software engineer, Node.js and AWS
From December 2024 he was employed full-time as a senior software engineer. His principal work was the Terminal Management System (TMS) for Sikha Tech, the company behind certified MiniSR point-of-sale devices used by Nepali banks. Working essentially alone with AI-assisted tooling, he gathered requirements, designed the PostgreSQL schema, wrote the Next.js and Prisma backend and the React interface, and built the AWS infrastructure: IoT Core with provision-by-claim certificates, MQTT-triggered Lambda functions, SigV4-signed WebSocket log streaming, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudFormation and…
- Card Activation Terminal (CAT) — Shipped · 2025. Handheld-terminal platform that activates a bank card and sets its PIN at the service desk in seconds, replacing an ATM-based Green-PIN process. Cognito-authorised APIs, DynamoDB, IoT fleet provisioning with claim certificates and over-the-air updates. Live across SCT member institutions.
- Terminal Management System (TMS) — Shipped · 2025. Fleet-management platform for certified point-of-sale terminals: provisioning, firmware delivery, parameter configuration, transaction logs, heartbeats and role-based access. Live at Nabil Bank and Prime Bank on more than fifty terminals; built in about six months by a single engineer.
Software engineer (contract)
Devkota joined Nepal Digital Systems (NDS), a Kathmandu embedded-systems and IoT company, as a contractor in September 2023 to build a device-local web interface for Hypnotik, a United States lighting company whose controllers run WLED firmware on ESP32 microcontrollers. Because firmware flash space was tight, the interface was written in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript and compiled into the C firmware build, with WebSocket control and both station and access-point Wi-Fi modes. He also built the company's website at hypnotik.io.
- ESP32 / WLED device UI — Shipped · 2023 – 2024. Device-local control interface compiled into WLED firmware for ESP32 lighting controllers; no framework, WebSocket control, station and access-point modes, no cloud or app required.
DASRAA Technology
Employer · Lalitpur, NepalSoftware services company he co-founded
Technical co-founder and lead engineer
In July 2023, during his final semester, Devkota and five classmates registered DASRAA Technology Pvt. Ltd., a Lalitpur software services company in which he was the only engineer. Over eighteen months the company delivered more than thirty projects for clients in Nepal, Australia, Greece and the United States. For Multi Dynamic, an Australian real-estate group, he migrated six franchise websites and their databases between DigitalOcean accounts, optimised the Laravel platform's scheduled jobs, built an FTP-based synchronisation with the Agentbox CRM, and added new lead-capture and franchise…
- Aloe Herbals headless store — Shipped · 2024. Headless e-commerce platform with custom eSewa payment and NepalCanMove fulfilment providers, Algolia search, Twilio and SendGrid notifications and a face-scan feature; sustained 200–300 concurrent shoppers during live-stream sales.
Australian Pathak
Organization · tiktok.com/@australianpathakShopify bookstore for Nepali-language books in Australia
Co-founder and Shopify developer
With his brother and a cousin, Devkota co-founded Australian Pathak, a Shopify bookstore selling Nepali-language books to the Nepali community in Australia. He built the store, sourced books from dealers in Nepal, handled shipping and ran content and influencer outreach. The store sold roughly 200 books to about 180 customers before closing when the Australian partners relocated. The TikTok account, with videos he produced in Canva and TikTok, was his first sustained work in video and marketing.
Sikshya Technology
Employer · Lalitpur, Nepal · sikshyatech.comWeb company
Web developer (intern, then developer)
Devkota's first employment was an internship at Sikshya Technology, a Lalitpur web company, during his fifth semester. He worked in PHP and CodeIgniter under a senior developer, built and deployed WordPress sites for the company and for the client Big Industries Nepal, and handled DNS management and Azure deployments before leaving to concentrate on his final semesters.
Big Industries Nepal
Client · NepalInvestment company
Freelance developer
While a student he built the website of Big Industries Nepal, an investment company, in plain PHP and MySQL with a custom content-management system for jobs, news, blogs, images and videos. It was his first production project.
Projects
What Deshant Devkota has built, for employers, for clients and for himself.
| Project | Context | Description | Stack |
|---|---|---|---|
 Terminal Management System (TMS) | Nepal Digital Systems, 2025 | Fleet-management platform for certified point-of-sale terminals: provisioning, firmware delivery, parameter configuration, transaction logs, heartbeats and role-based access. Live at Nabil Bank and Prime Bank on more than fifty terminals; built in about six months by a single engineer. | Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL on RDS, AWS IoT Core, Lambda, SQS, RDS Proxy, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudFormation |
 Card Activation Terminal (CAT) | Nepal Digital Systems, 2025 | Handheld-terminal platform that activates a bank card and sets its PIN at the service desk in seconds, replacing an ATM-based Green-PIN process. Cognito-authorised APIs, DynamoDB, IoT fleet provisioning with claim certificates and over-the-air updates. Live across SCT member institutions. | React, AWS Amplify, API Gateway, Cognito, DynamoDB, IoT Core, Lambda, S3 |
 OneTake | OneTake, 2026 | Always-on-top overlay for OBS Studio that snips mistakes while recording and exports one clean file or an EDL. Windows, macOS and Linux; one-time licence. | Electron, React, TypeScript, Next.js, Supabase Auth, Paddle Billing, AWS S3, GitHub Actions |
| Aloe Herbals headless store | DASRAA Technology, 2024 | Headless e-commerce platform with custom eSewa payment and NepalCanMove fulfilment providers, Algolia search, Twilio and SendGrid notifications and a face-scan feature; sustained 200–300 concurrent shoppers during live-stream sales. | MedusaJS, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, BullMQ, GitHub Actions, DigitalOcean |
 ESP32 / WLED device UI | Nepal Digital Systems, 2023 – 2024 | Device-local control interface compiled into WLED firmware for ESP32 lighting controllers; no framework, WebSocket control, station and access-point modes, no cloud or app required. | HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C (firmware build), ESP32, WLED |
| AgExpress operations platform | AgExpress Cargo, 2026 | Backend, staff dashboard and delivery pipeline for a Hong Kong-based logistics company serving the Nepali diaspora: US customs AMS filing, PostGIS territory routing for partner onboarding, per-PR preview environments, approval-gated production deploys. | NestJS, TypeORM, PostgreSQL 16, PostGIS, Next.js, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, Google Artifact Registry, Nginx |
 Golos | Own project | Real-time multiplayer implementation of Dots and Boxes ("Golo Jodne") with a single-player minimax opponent at three search depths. | Node.js, Express, Socket.io, JavaScript |
| FonePay dynamic QR demo | Own project, 2025 | Reference implementation of FonePay dynamic QR generation for point-of-sale transactions. | JavaScript |
| PomodoroWars | Own project | A Pomodoro-timer game. Planned; not started yet. |
Skills
| Backend | Node.js, NestJS, Express, TypeScript, REST APIs, WebSockets, server-sent events, SQS, event-driven microservices, OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, role-based access control |
| Frontend | React, Next.js (App Router, SSR/SSG), Electron, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui |
| Data | PostgreSQL (indexing, read replicas, pooling), MySQL, DynamoDB, Redis, Supabase, TypeORM, Prisma |
| Cloud and DevOps | AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, RDS and RDS Proxy, S3, IoT Core, Cognito, CloudFormation, CloudWatch), Google Cloud (Artifact Registry, Workload Identity Federation), Vercel, DigitalOcean, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, Git Flow, Nginx, Linux |
| Commerce and payments | Shopify (Liquid sections, Flow, checkout, multi-brand), MedusaJS, WooCommerce, eSewa, FonePay, NepalPay, SmartQR, Paddle |
| Embedded | ESP32, WLED, Tasmota, MQTT, provisioning by claim, OTA updates |
| Ways of working | AI-assisted engineering with agents (planning, tests, release loops), asynchronous remote collaboration across US, EU and AU time zones, teaching and curriculum design |
Selected works
- OneTake — Product site and licensing for the desktop app8
- Australian Pathak on TikTok — Short videos made for the bookstore, 2022–20239
- Chess.com profile — dexa19482, rapid and blitz games10
- Golos — Source code, Dots and Boxes with minimax AI11
- fonepay-dynamic-qr-demo — FonePay dynamic QR reference code12
- simple-provision-by-claim — AWS IoT provisioning-by-claim example13
- Stop Asking If Engineers Use AI — Ask How They Think with It — Article, 202614
- Recent Project Summary: loop engineering with Fable 5.1 — Video walkthrough of an automated PR-preview pipeline, 202615
- pennpaperalgos — Older educational videos on algorithms (Euclid, Bézout's identity, data mining)16
Education
| Institution | Qualification | Years | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vedas College, Tribhuvan University | B.Sc. in Computer Science and Information Technology | 2018 – 2022 | 3175 of 4200 marks, 75.60 per cent, first division |
| Valmiki Shiksha Sadan Secondary School | Higher secondary (Grades XI and XII), science | 2015 – 2017 | 770 of 1000 marks, 77.00 per cent, distinction |
| Small Heaven Model School | School Leaving Certificate (Grade 10) | 2012 – 2015 | 642 of 800 marks, 80.25 per cent, first division with distinction |
| Sunflower Boarding School | Nursery to class 7 | 2003 – 2012 |
Scans of the certificates are not published. Employers and institutions can request verified copies; access is granted for a limited time.
Teaching and community
Where Deshant Devkota has taught, and the student community he co-founded.
Part-time lecturer, Vedas College
Part-time lecturer · May 2024 – present · Lalitpur, NepalSince May 2024 Devkota has lectured part-time at Vedas College, his alma mater, teaching IT and Applications (BBM), Introduction to Information Technology (CSIT) and Computer Security, and using AI tools in class.
Vedas Hashtag
Community · Lalitpur, NepalVedas Hashtag is a student technology community at Vedas College in Lalitpur. Devkota co-founded it in July 2022, while he was a student of the college. It organises hackathons, talks and training sessions, among them the Coding Marathon and the talk series Vedas Hashtag Speaks, and it is still active.
Writing
Notes and articles by Deshant Devkota, newest first.
- 9 September 2026 How this site is built — Why deshant.com looks like a Wikipedia article (short answer: laziness, well managed), and what it is made of.
External links
- Email: devkotadexant@gmail.com
- GitHub — DexA1948
- LinkedIn — deshantdevkota
- YouTube — @DeshantaDevkota (occasional videos on engineering and life)
- YouTube — @pennpaperalgos (older educational videos)
- Instagram — @weird_valley_aesthetics (photography, cafés)
- X — @DeshantDexs
- Chess.com — dexa19482
- LeetCode — dexa1948
- OneTake — product website
- Résumé (PDF)
Personal life
“Enjoy, for consciousness is a blessing given to few. The non-living would envy you if they could.”
— Deshant Devkota, Pinned post on X, 19 July 2021 source
Family and beliefs
Devkota married Sadikshya Yadav in February 2026. He has a twin brother. He lives in Lalitpur, in the Kathmandu valley, and spends most working days in cafés with a laptop. Born into a Hindu family, he describes himself as agnostic, at times close to atheism, and says he does not hesitate to lean on God for support when needed.
Interests
What Deshant Devkota reads, watches, plays and makes outside work.
Reading
What Deshant Devkota reads: books, poetry and literature.
Books
He reads roughly one book a month. He is currently reading How Google Changed the World by Virginia Scott.
Favourites
Poetry and literature
As a child he loved literature and poetry. William Wordsworth was a fixture of every year's English reader, and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" ("Daffodils") remains a favourite. In Nepali, the Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota, whose surname he shares, is his greatest; "Bhikari" ("The Beggar") is the poem he returns to. Bhairab Aryal's satirical essay "Jai Bhudi", from the collection of the same name, is another favourite.
Watching
What he watches: anime, films and stand-up comedy.
Anime and cartoons
The anime he follows or has followed, and the cartoons he grew up on.
Anime
Cartoons
Films
He watches South Indian cinema and the Marvel and DC franchises; his favourite character is Batman, followed by Iron Man and Deadpool.
Stand-up comedy
For about six months Devkota performed stand-up comedy, delivering four stage sets of, in his own words, very bad jokes.
Playing
What he plays: chess, video games and algorithm puzzles.
Chess
Chess is one of his favourite hobbies, played almost entirely online on Chess.com under the handle dexa19482, and, by his own description, played badly. Between joining in February 2025 and September 2026 he logged roughly 750 rated games: a rapid rating around 460 (peak 579) with 315 wins, 296 losses and 24 draws, a blitz rating around 300, and a puzzle rating that reached 1391.17
Games
His first games were on the LCD "brick game" handhelds and on Famicom-clone consoles whose cartridges promised "99,999 games in one": Contra, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and Duck Hunt. Without a home computer until about class 8, he used school labs, the occasional library machine and the Internet cafés that were everywhere in Nepal then, where friends passed around pendrives of Miniclip installers and the room played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Vice City and Tekken 3; failing that, MS Paint would do, because he simply liked being in front of a screen. On a Nokia it was Snake and Bounce. He has wanted to make a game of his own ever since, under a studio he would call DexA1948.
Algorithms and LeetCode
He keeps a LeetCode account (dexa1948) that he describes as unimpressive, with two problems solved as of September 2026 and a plan to change that. The algorithmic grounding is elsewhere: the Design and Analysis of Algorithms coursework he pushed to GitHub in his fifth semester covers sorting, searching, recursion, backtracking and dynamic programming, and he is comfortable reasoning about time and space complexity.18
Making
What he makes outside work: videos and photographs.
YouTube and video-making
Devkota has made videos on and off since his student years. His main channel, @DeshantaDevkota, carries occasional pieces on engineering and life, most recently a walkthrough of the automated pull-request preview pipeline he built for AgExpress; an older channel, pennpaperalgos, holds short lessons on Euclid's algorithm, Bézout's identity and data mining from his degree. Running the Australian Pathak bookstore in 2022–2023 turned into a crash course in short-form video, editing in Canva and TikTok. That interest resurfaced in 2026 and is the reason OneTake exists: the app he built for creators is the tool he wanted for his own recordings.192021
How the channel started, why, and why it came back in 2026 will be told in his own words in a later revision.
Cafés, coffee and photography
A self-described coffee and cosy-café lover, Devkota currently spends his working days in cafés around Lalitpur with a laptop. Photography, mostly of cafés and the Kathmandu valley, is his main hobby; he publishes it on Instagram.
Moving
How he gets around: a motorbike and bicycles.
Motorbike and bicycles
He holds a motorcycle licence and gets around Lalitpur by motorbike and bicycle rather than by car.
Influences
Devkota names Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds as his biggest inspirations in technology, and follows Mark Zuckerberg; he intends to follow Andrej Karpathy and Andrew Ng more closely. Bill Gates and Elon Musk were earlier influences. In his first years of the B.Sc. CSIT programme he watched the life and success stories of these figures, which motivated him to pursue the field; other creators, among them ForrestKnight, grounded that enthusiasm in the realities of the job. Outside technology, his longest-standing influence is PewDiePie, whom he has watched since childhood. What holds his attention…
Life
The chapters of Deshant Devkota's life, in order.
Early life and schooling
Devkota was born in Bharatpur, in Nepal's Chitwan District, and grew up there with his twin brother. From nursery to class 7 the twins attended Sunflower Boarding School, where their parents coached them closely; he did well in mathematics, science and English and was, by his own account, very shy, the kind of child who stuck to books. When the Rameshwor Library opened nearby, the brothers went whenever they could, after school or in breaks, for foreign stories, mythology and fantasy, and for what he could absorb about evolution, cosmology, astronomy, the history of the Earth, birds, animals and dinosaurs. He still remembers first reading about the Big Bang in about class 4: "it shifted my entire perspective about life, though I was really young with not much perspective at all."
His first programming was in QBASIC in class 6, under a computer teacher who also ran the school's lab. He wrote quiz games and dreamt of recreating the games he played, Snake and Bounce on a Nokia. Class 6 to 10 brought a steady diet of QBASIC pattern printing, palindromes, Armstrong numbers and ASCII art, which later made the first semesters of C at university feel familiar. He did not have regular access to a computer until about class 8; in that year he picked up an HTML book at the library and built his first website, with tables, colours and anchor tags, of which he was very proud.
From 2005 to 2015 he attended Small Heaven Model School in Aanptari, Bharatpur, taking Additional Mathematics and Computer Science as optional subjects, and passed the School Leaving Certificate examination of 2015 in the first division with distinction. Much of his time there was spent in the school library with his twin brother, reading DC comics and whatever else was on the shelves, which is where his liking for Batman began. He then studied science at Valmiki Shiksha Sadan Secondary School in Baidiknagar, Bharatpur, completing Grades XI and XII in 2017 with distinction.
In 2018 he moved to the Kathmandu valley to read Computer Science and Information Technology at Vedas College, Lalitpur, an affiliate of Tribhuvan University, starting with C. PHP came next and with it web development: a CRUD site for Big Industries Nepal in PHP, MySQL and a CSS framework, hosted on free hosting, which was turned down for its interface but landed him a fifth-semester internship at Sikshya Technology, where a senior developer mentored him in CodeIgniter and he learned WordPress and DNS.22232425
References
- ^ “Deshant Devkota”. LinkedIn. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Terminal Management System (TMS) — Sikha Tech”. LinkedIn Projects. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Card Activation Terminal (CAT) — SCT”. LinkedIn Projects. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Aloe Herbals”. aloeherbals.com. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Hypnotik”. hypnotik.io. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “AG Express”. ag.express. Retrieved 9 September 2026.
- ^ “OneTake — Record once. Snip mistakes. Never re-take.”. onetakeproject.com. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “OneTake — Record once. Snip mistakes. Never re-take.”. onetakeproject.com. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Deshant Devkota”. LinkedIn. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “dexa19482 — player statistics”. Chess.com public API. Retrieved 9 September 2026.
- ^ “Golos — multiplayer Dots and Boxes with minimax AI”. GitHub. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “fonepay-dynamic-qr-demo”. GitHub. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “simple-provision-by-claim”. GitHub. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Stop Asking If Engineers Use AI — Ask How They Think with It”. LinkedIn. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Deshant Devkota”. YouTube. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “pennpaperalgos”. YouTube. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “dexa19482 — player statistics”. Chess.com public API. Retrieved 9 September 2026.
- ^ “dexa1948”. LeetCode. Retrieved 9 September 2026.
- ^ “Deshant Devkota”. YouTube. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “pennpaperalgos”. YouTube. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “OneTake — Record once. Snip mistakes. Never re-take.”. onetakeproject.com. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Bharatpur, Nepal”. Wikipedia. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “School Leaving Certificate (Nepal)”. Wikipedia. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Tribhuvan University”. Wikipedia. Retrieved 8 September 2026.
- ^ “Sikshya Technology”. sikshyatech.com. Retrieved 8 September 2026.