Kushal Neupane

Computer science, Texas A&M University–Texarkana. Kathmandu, then Texarkana.

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I build things that only work if two strangers show up at the same time. So far that has been the problem.

I'm a computer science student at Texas A&M University–Texarkana, graduating May 2027. Before Texas I was in Kathmandu, and my first job in tech was data work for CloudFactory at a desk in Nepal, for a company whose office I never once walked into. Working with people I would never meet was normal to me before it was normal to most people, which is probably why I keep building software about being in the same room.

Two of those now exist. Someone Today pairs anonymous strangers for a conversation. Out shows you who is free and nearby right now. Both of them work beautifully with a thousand people online and not at all with four. I built the second one already knowing that, which is the part I am least proud of and the reason I am writing it down here instead of leaving it off the page.

Since then I have been building a small thing a week on a workbench instead — a game, a display, a sprite of my grandfather that walks along the bottom of my screen. All of it works for one person on day one, which is the thing the first two got wrong.

The rest of my time has been less romantic. For most of 2025 I was the person you called when a classroom projector died ten minutes before a lecture, or when a student locked themselves out of the account holding their only copy of a term paper. Before that I was a resident assistant and a first-year coach, which is four years of evidence that I would rather be in the building than remote — and, I suspect, the actual reason both of my products are about presence.

I am looking for a software engineering internship for summer 2027.

Units described on this sheet

Aa3

Someone Today

A free, anonymous place to talk to one other person. No account, no profile, no history kept after you close the tab. There is also a Letters side to it: you write something at three in the morning and somebody you will never identify writes back. I built and shipped all of it alone, on Node.js.

Figure The launch post drew 52 reactions, 25 comments and 8 reposts.

What went wrong Real-time pairing needs two people online at the same moment, and early on there usually weren't two. People arrived, waited in an empty room, and left. The product was working exactly as designed and it still failed the person standing in it.

Hpe

Out

I was bored, nobody was around, so I built the thing that would have fixed it. One tap says you're free; you see other people within three miles who are also free right now. A first name and whether you want coffee, a walk or food — that is the entire profile. Presence deletes itself after three hours.

What went wrong The same wall as before, in a more obvious costume. A proximity app with nobody nearby is an empty map, and one campus never got dense enough for it to feel alive. The three-hour expiry was the privacy feature and it was also the thing that guaranteed the map was empty whenever anyone checked.

Aa4

The summer bench

A device a week on an ESP32: Snake on a 128×64 OLED, an LED matrix that scrolls a different encouraging line every minute, a lyric display that lands its animation on a real drum hit. Every graphic drawn in code, because there is no room to load an image. And a pixel version of my grandfather, who walks along the bottom of my screen while I work.

Figure About $6 in parts for the lyric display. One user for the sprite, which was the whole idea.