This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.
K15t, a 4 year Pledge 1% member, has teamed up with Scienta, a tech consultant company out of Norway. They put together a team of inspiring conference speakers to present at a free and local developer conference in Kathmandu. Our team member, Sven Peters used his Pledge 1% leave time to prepare a workshop, travel to Nepal, and educate 100 developers, project managers, and team leaders working for local companies on how they can start a successful remote work career in the tech industry. A day after the conference, the team of speakers visited the Kathmandu University to learn more about the state of its developer education and to give a guest lecture to the Masters students who attend.
State of Software Development in Nepal
Software development is still a relatively young industry in Nepal. Although Kathmandu University has been teaching software engineering for over 18 years, it benefits a lot by bringing in experienced developers from abroad as guest lecturers. We had insightful discussions on how the western software industry is developing products in a practical, methodical way: Version control, deployment pipelines, serverless development, and agile development practices. It also became clear that students in Nepal can benefit a lot from these real world development experiences from companies abroad.
Continue to Help
Offering sponsored internships, exchanging experiences, and offering guest lectures can help the Nepalese software industry. Organizations like Gitlab, Trello, Zapier, Stack Overflow, and many more are fully remote companies and have proven that it shouldn’t matter where in the world we’re based as long as we have a good and stable internet connection. There’s a lack of software developers in every industry and Nepal is buzzing with great talent. We should continue to work on bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and the practical development experience in Nepal.
