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About

Backend systems and guitar/bass didn't arrive on the same timeline by accident — they've just both been going the whole time. Here's the longer version of how.

Music

My first music memories are old Nepali pop-rock and Bollywood soundtracks — not exactly headbanger stuff. That changed once I found Eminem, Tupac, Dr. Dre, and Busta Rhymes, and then Green Day and Linkin Park pulled me the rest of the way into rock.

The exact moment guitar became the plan: hearing Guns N' Roses' "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" run straight into Slash's second solo. One thought — I want to be like this — and that was that. I studied everyone after: John Frusciante, John Mayer, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Dimebag Darrell, Billie Joe Armstrong, Eric Clapton, Eric Johnson. On the Nepali side: Hari Maharjan of Nepathya, Manoj Kumar KC of 1974AD, Edge, Albatross.

Around 2011, still in school, I saw a band called Paranormal play a few original songs — "Revival" among them — plus a cover of Billy Talent's "Viking Death March," at a Kanti School venue. Their guitarist, Monsoon Bishwakarma, was a senior of mine. Years later, Monsoon ran a guitar workshop where I met his younger brother Manogya, and the two of us started jamming and writing constantly — at some point we just decided we should be a band. That band was first called Amity; we had a song, "Hawa Huri," in the SongNepal 2014 Acoustic competition.

Amity, before it was kidsandheroes

Then I left for Bengaluru to study Information Science and Engineering (2014-2018), playing the odd college show and battle-of-the-bands along the way. When I came back, Bikee Rajkarnikar and Monsoon had started AudioAdvent, the studio I still record out of. Manogya and I renamed the band kidsandheroes in 2017, and once I moved home for good in 2018, we actually started finishing songs — "Buddhu Pariwar," "Jaat Ko Meter," "Goreto," "Maile Bujhey," and "Maran Katha" were among the first.

Somewhere in there I also joined Harip Tatwo on bass, alongside Monsoon. And Paranormal — the band I'd watched as a kid — came full circle in 2018 too: their guitarist Bijay "Hercules" Khatri (also of Jhutro) left for Australia, I filled in for a few shows, and ended up staying. I haven't recorded with Paranormal yet, just played live so far.

Recording with kidsandheroes and Harip Tatwo taught me most of what I actually know about studio work — tracking, still learning to mix, and just being useful in a room with other musicians. In 2019 I bought my first Sahana guitar as one of their artists (thank you, Apurva dai), and we played a lot of Kathmandu venues — Beers N' Cheers most memorably. Three releases later — Goreto (kidsandheroes), Baacha and Trishna (Harip Tatwo) — plus collaborations with Jhutro, Mak Rai, and Kristina Allen, and that's the music side of the story so far.

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Career

I'd already decided I wanted to work in software around age 16 — the kid who wanted to know how the PC actually worked, not just play games on it. After +2 I went to Bengaluru for the engineering degree mentioned above, then came back to Kathmandu in November 2018 — partly because I wanted to actually do music here, not study computers somewhere else.

My first job was at Danphe Health, a startup building hospital management software, for Rs. 5,000 a month — a humbling number after four years of engineering study, and Kathmandu isn't cheap. My parents helped me get through it. A few months in I got promoted and things got easier. That's also where I actually learned frontend — Angular, HTML/CSS/JS/TS — mostly from scratch, since college hadn't covered much of it. Abhishek dai took a chance on me early, and once I had frontend down, I moved into backend and SQL. That company taught me how to own an application end-to-end, and I'm still close with that old team.

A hospital visit, back in the Danphe Health days

In 2020, the Danphe team later became part of Imark Pvt. Ltd. — a much bigger operation. I got promoted into management there, and learned what any bigger team teaches you: bigger challenges, more moving parts, more people to keep in sync. At some point I was working with a team based out of Gurgaon, which was its own kind of learning. Eventually I felt like I'd learned what that place could teach me, and it was time to find the next one.

Downtime with the Imark team

A community cleaning day with the team

One full-circle moment from that era: years earlier, I'd applied for the IOE scholarship to Pulchowk Campus — the top roughly 400 ranked students got in, and I missed it, landing somewhere around rank 1800. Years later, Imark sponsored Locus, one of Pulchowk's biggest events, and they sent me along as a judge.

Around 2022-2023 I also got sent to ng-India in Delhi — met Angular's creator, some folks from teams like Auth0, and made good memories and friends out of it.

Onstage at ng-India, Delhi — May 2022

Ashim Batajoo — a senior of mine from college in Bengaluru, and the person who originally got me my Danphe interview — was at Naya Software Inc. when I was ready to move on, so in March 2023, that's where I went. I'm still there, working on software delivered to clients in the US, which is its own education. Ashim's in Canada these days — if I end up there too, that'll be a fitting joke.