Bishal Sapkota is a Melbourne-based software engineer, entrepreneur, and educator with over a decade of experience building software and helping teams put new technologies to work. His work spans cloud infrastructure, microservices, and AI systems, with a current focus on foundation models and agentic AI. Through Outback Yak, he works on customer projects and builds products of his own, including K cha khabar, a bilingual news intelligence platform for Nepal.

A long-time advocate for open source and vendor neutrality, Bishal believes developers should have a say in where their software runs and how it evolves. That interest has taken him from cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Linkerd to building an entirely open-source web mapping stack. It also explains his enthusiasm for open-weight AI: the freedom to experiment, adapt models, and take more control over the systems he builds.

Bishal shares what he learns through his courses, his podcast, *The Path to Tech*, and talks at developer meetups and conferences. His teaching draws on projects he has built, decisions he has had to make, and the tradeoffs that rarely fit into a product announcement. He enjoys making technical ideas approachable and giving people something useful to try themselves.

Away from the keyboard, he enjoys playing basketball and mentoring developers finding their way in the industry.

Learn more: https://bishal.io/