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CHAPTER 08 / SAROJ PRASAD MAINALI

Beyond the code.

Notes on engineering, AI, leadership, and building software from Kathmandu. No tutorials, mostly. Just the honest parts: the bugs, the 2am fixes, the opinions I have earned the hard way.

23 POSTS

2025

5 ENTRIES
Life● FEATURED

Wearing Many Hats: Projects, Programming, and the Chaos In Between

My life is basically a massive codebase. Different modules, running in parallel, with the occasional bug that pops up at the worst possible moment.

May 18, 20257 min readREAD →
Opinion● FEATURED

AI Is Doing to Developers What China Did to Factory Workers

AI is the new China, and developers are now the new working class. The junior roles are getting autocompleted out of existence.

April 22, 20258 min readREAD →
Philosophy

The Past, Present, and Death: Three Things That Are Always True

People say death is the only truth of the universe. But the past and present are also truths. The only false thing might be our thoughts about the future.

March 30, 20256 min readREAD →
Machine Learning● FEATURED

Teaching a Computer to Read Nepali Handwriting (And What It Cost Me)

I built a CNN that hit 99.98% accuracy on handwritten Devanagari characters. Here is what those nights of training, and the GPU bills, actually cost.

February 14, 20259 min readREAD →
Backend

FastAPI vs Django: Three Years In Production, Here Is the Real Answer

Not a tutorial. Real opinions from shipping both in Nepal's market, including the project where one of them quietly failed me.

January 19, 20258 min readREAD →

2024

13 ENTRIES
Leadership

On Being a CTO at 24 in Kathmandu

The loneliness of it. Making decisions you are not sure about. Mentoring people ten years older than you. Here is what nobody tells you.

December 12, 20248 min readREAD →
Automation

I Automated 1,500 Hours of Manual Work. Here Is What Happened After.

The hospital RPA project, the Playwright bots, and the weird feeling when your bot quietly replaces a person.

November 28, 20247 min readREAD →
Architecture

Multi-Tenant SaaS from Scratch: Every Mistake I Made (And There Were Many)

Building the EdTech SaaS at Neuron Nest. RBAC gone wrong, tenant isolation bugs, and the meeting I will never forget.

November 5, 20249 min readREAD →
Mobile

Flutter vs React Native in 2024: I Have Shipped Both. Here Is My Take.

Not benchmarks. Real client expectations in Nepal, including the one who demanded iOS and Android for a 500 dollar budget.

October 16, 20247 min readREAD →
Career

580 Problems Later: Why I Still Open LeetCode Every Morning

It is not about a FAANG job. It is about training the brain. And the moment a graph problem clicked because of something at work.

September 24, 20246 min readREAD →
Career

The Real Cost of Freelancing as a Developer in Nepal

Payment gateways that do not work, clients who think 100 dollars is a fortune, and the one client from Norway who paid on time, every month.

August 30, 20248 min readREAD →
Climate

Water Doesn't Code Itself: What I Learned Building Hydrological Models for NGOs

The WEAP model for Godawari, CMIP6 bias correction, and how a web developer ended up modeling Nepal's water future to 2050.

July 28, 20248 min readREAD →
Leadership

Why I Mentor Junior Developers Even When I Am Barely Keeping Up

The four engineers at Neuron Nest. The one who wrote perfect code but could not explain it. The one who explained everything but wrote terrible code.

June 30, 20246 min readREAD →
Machine Learning

Building AI Tools for a Photography Studio (No, It Was Not What I Expected)

KS Photography Station. The AI culling pipeline. 2000 wedding photos, four hours of work cut to twenty minutes, and one very skeptical photographer.

May 31, 20247 min readREAD →
Life

Growing Up With Computers in Nepal: From Internet Cafe to Engineering

The expensive internet cafe hours, the pirated software, and the first time I wrote a program that did something real.

April 27, 20247 min readREAD →
Engineering

The Gap Between the Documentation and Production Is Where You Grow

The library that works perfectly in the README. The 3am where nothing makes sense. The realization that everyone is just guessing.

March 29, 20246 min readREAD →
Open Source

I Keep Building Open Source Projects Nobody Uses. Here Is Why I Won't Stop.

More than 80 repos. Forks that go nowhere. The occasional star from a stranger in Germany. Why it matters anyway.

February 24, 20246 min readREAD →
Engineering

What Game Theory Taught Me About Software Architecture Decisions

Nash equilibrium and API design. Zero-sum versus positive-sum client relationships. The prisoner's dilemma of technical debt.

January 27, 20247 min readREAD →

2023

5 ENTRIES
Productivity

Context Switching Is Not Killing Your Focus. It Is Building It.

The popular take says context switching destroys you. I am going to argue the opposite, from hydrology to web to mobile in a single day.

December 16, 20236 min readREAD →
Engineering

The Deployment That Broke Everything and What I Did Next

A 4pm Friday deploy. The Slack message. The rollback that did not work. Three hours of pure panic, and what I learned about shipping.

November 18, 20237 min readREAD →
DevOps

Running Kubernetes in Nepal: What Nobody Warned Me About

Power cuts during cluster maintenance. Internet that drops mid-deploy. The cost of cloud in rupees. Why I still chose Kubernetes anyway.

October 21, 20237 min readREAD →
Productivity

I Started Journaling Every Sprint. Six Months Later, Here Is What Changed.

The practice, what I write, and the moment I realized the notes were showing me a problem I had been blind to.

September 23, 20236 min readREAD →
Life

On Finishing What You Start (Coming From Someone Who Has 80 Unfinished Repos)

The graveyard of side projects. Why they die. The three that made it. And what finishing actually means.

August 26, 20237 min readREAD →
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