Interests
Contents
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 1391.1
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.2
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.345
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…
References
- ^ “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.