Hi, I’m Nicolas Pettican Tenpa Bhikshu
software engineer · Buddhist monk · aspiring scholar
A European Buddhist monk living and studying at a Tibetan monastery in the Indian Himalayas. Before ordaining I built a career in software engineering and project management in healthcare and IT. These days I split my time between writing code for monastic causes, studying advanced Buddhist philosophy and training in monastic discipline.
What I’m doing now#
Building#
Online platforms and initiatives to support the longevity of Buddhism. Currently leading the development of Offering Bowl — a platform that lets lay sponsors support monastics directly.
Studying#
Advanced Buddhist philosophy at the Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö Institute in Bir, Himachal Pradesh, alongside academic research affiliated with Savitribai Phule Pune University.
Practising#
Monastic life. Fully ordained (Bhikshu) in the Mūlasarvāstivāda (Tibetan) tradition, living at the monastery year-round, unless I am in Pune or in a forest monastery in Thailand.
My experience#
Offering Bowl (2024–present) — Chairman and lead engineer of a sponsorship platform connecting Buddhist monastics with lay donors. TypeScript, Node.js, Vue, and AWS IaC.
Doc Cirrus GmbH (2019–2022, Berlin) — Team Lead / Senior Engineer on inSuite, a practice-management platform for German medical institutions. Led the containerisation and periphery web app development team.
MADANA (2018–2019, Berlin) — Head of Development at an early-stage privacy and data-analysis tech startup. Planned a healthcare pilot for privacy-enhancing analytics.
Unique Insights (2017–2018, Manchester) — Head of Development. Built a customer-understanding conversational app on ML APIs before LLMs became popular.
More on /work/.