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Since I was working remotely anyway, I started looking for ways to develop my skills and competence further. Ideally, at some academic institution. At some point I found out that higher education in Sweden was completely free of charge. (At that time it was free even for people outside of the European Union, which is no longer the case.) So, I made some applications and a few months later was admitted to the masters programme "Software Engineering and Management" at the University of Gothenburg. Such an opportunity should not be missed! The programme was run in collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology, which meant that part of the courses were organized by the University of Gothenburg while another part by Chalmers University of Technology. What remained was to convince a few managers at Eurosoft that I could manage both full-time work and full-time education. One of them expressed a lot of resistance. However, after I was assigned to another project with another manager, the problem suddenly vanished. Surprise, surprise! If it was possible to combine full-time education with two part-time jobs, it is also possible to combine full-time education with one full-time job. It is just the question of flexibility and time management – especially identifying those tasks that are critically important among others that do not matter.
Most of the courses turned out to be relatively straightforward, most of the things I already knew. To be honest, after completing my previous studies at a post-Soviet technical university, courses at the University of Gothenburg felt more like being at a kindergarten. However, the other part organized by Chalmers University of Technology turned out to be a bit more technical and challenging. For me it was a lot of fun when we had to organize in agile teams and develop mobile applications in Java. No one among us had previous experience in development for Android. But we managed anyway! One course that I found particularly interesting was model-driven engineering or MDE, which had practical assignments that got me thinking during a few long evenings (smoothly transitioning into mornings). The thesis work also required some thinking, not only in technical terms.