Building products while in school: an honest manual

Studying Pharmacy while building products means living with two sets of deadlines, and one of them (exams) has no slack, no extensions, and real consequences. Over time I've built an operating manual that keeps both alive. Here it is, honestly.

The systems

Seasons, not balance. There is no daily "balance." There are build seasons and exam seasons, and the switch between them is explicit and planned. Fighting for balance every day produced guilt; planning seasons produced shipped products and passed exams.

Boring infrastructure only. Exams mean three weeks of not touching the server. Everything I run must survive that: managed hosting, automatic backups, no exotic dependencies that need babysitting. My stack is boring by design, and it's the reason products stay up while I'm in the library.

Small scopes, always. The unit of work is a task that fits in a gap between lectures. Nothing that requires "a free weekend" — free weekends are a myth in school.

Status over ambition. Users forgive slow. They don't forgive silence. A status page and honest changelogs cost minutes and buy patience.

The honest part

Some things lose. My social time lost for a while. Some product ideas lost — killed by the season system, which is the point: the system kills ideas I can't resource, so I don't die proving it.