I did it, I finished my masters in Informatics. After five and a half years I finally don’t have to worry any more about exams and tasks for the university. A relieving feeling.

Retrospective

Looking back at the time in the university (University of Applied Sciences Berlin) I’m happy that I took the challenge of starting to study. As I don’t have the normally mandatory “Abitur” I was only able to study because auf my apprenticeship and work experience. This actually helped me a lot to put some of the content of the lessons into context. Also I think that my higher age (compared to my fellow students) helped me, to take the study more serious.

The curriculum of the University is in my opinion OK. In the bachelor one of the specialization I tried for one semester (facility management) was not useful at all but the updated curriculum already ditched this topic. What I recommend to add to the curriculum would be a tutoring about Version Control, Build Server and CI early in the study. If I remember correctly those topics never arose but were introduced to students by other students who worked in companies.

The Master curriculum was a bit more disappointingly. The master has a focus on research, which is reflected in 32 credit points out of 90 being research related (plus the master thesis which is also research related). This was somewhat cumbersome. I learned a lot in those topics but as it stands now I don’t want to do research (see next section).

Additionally to learning about a lot of different topics, I met fantastic people over the course of the study and am glad to know them. I had a great time learning different topics and I realized I like to learn and switch topics often. Sometimes I wished I had more time at a specific topics but the next topic also were interesting. So much to learn so little time.

I also started to work besides the study at a company (BIG Social Media GmbH) where I learned a lot about C#, .Net, Node, Docker, CI and Version Control. I could use a lot of the ideas for my study (as well as the money obviously), so I recommend working besides the study. Also if you are in Berlin and looking for a job doing Bots, Node and JavaScript as well as C#: Have a look at there openings.

What will be next?

I have no idea what will be next. Currently I’m on holiday, travelling the world or at least some parts of it. I’m thinking hard about what I will do after that. I’ll need money so I have to work. And this work will be something with informatics. But what it will be explicitly: I have no idea. Maybe working as a consultant or freelancer as this would enable me to have different projects often. Or starting my own business as I have plenty of ideas (some of them even are not completely useless!). Or I find the perfect company which fit to my needs.

At least for my own desire to learn I have gifted my self some ebooks from Manning (I had a 50% off coupon):

• Richard Feldman - Elm in Action (MEAP v3)
• Enrico Buonanno - Functional Programming in C# (MEAP v6)
• Dustin Metzgar - .NET Core in Action (MEAP v2)
• Benjamin Tan Wei Hao - The little Elixir & OTP Guidebook
• Jim Bennet - Xamarin in Action (MEAP v3)

As one can see functional programming (Elm in Action, Functional programming in C# and The little Elixir & OTP Guidebook) are one topic of interest as well as .Net (Functional Programming in C#, .Net Core in Action and Xamarin in Action). After I finished these I will post a short review (at least about the MEAP Versions)