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.
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…
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.