Exams and deadlines: how I schedule two careers
Semesters have seasons. Products have seasons. The calendar system that keeps both moving without either burning down.
By Nzubechukwu Cyprian · Pharmacy student at UNN, full-stack developer
Two careers compete for the same hours, and the competition isn't daily — it's seasonal. Fighting it daily produced guilt and mediocre output at both. Accepting seasons produced progress in both. My scheduling system, honestly described:
The season system
Build season (10–12 weeks of semester). Software gets the gaps: early mornings, free evenings, weekends not consumed by lab reports. Target: one meaningful push per product per week. Small, finished, shipped. Momentum over scale.
Exam season (3–4 weeks). Software drops to maintenance only: monitoring is automated, users get honest status notes, nothing new ships. Pre-exam, I deliberately bank easy wins — content, small fixes — so the repo stays warm without needing my brain.
Break season. The sprint window. Bigger features, riskier experiments, catch-up on everything deferred. This is when the products get their real altitude.
The rules that make it work
- infrastructure must survive exam season unattended — no fragile dependencies, ever
- every build season ends with deployed work, not local work. Deployed things keep working while I'm away
- write the next step down before leaving. Future-me, post-exams and rusty, needs a door
The system's real product is permission: I don't feel guilty building during build season or absent during exams. The calendar negotiated the trade so my conscience doesn't have to.
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