I study Computer Engineering at the University of Barcelona. Outside of class I am the CTO of WRDB, and I work on a few other apps. People ask how those two things fit together. The honest answer is that some weeks they don't, and I just pick whichever one is on fire.
Most of the time, though, they feed each other. That is the part worth writing about.
What the degree gives me
University is slow on purpose. You spend weeks on things you could skim in an afternoon: how a compiler parses, why a database index is a tree and not a list, what actually happens when two threads touch the same variable. None of it ships a feature on Tuesday. All of it shows up later, quietly, when a bug only makes sense if you understand the layer underneath.
I learned this the first time a Firestore query got slow and expensive. The fix was obvious once I remembered a data structures class I had half ignored. The degree is a big pile of "oh, so that is why" waiting to become useful.
What shipping gives me
Class gives you theory. Shipping gives you the parts nobody teaches. How to say no to a feature. How to read a crash report at one in the morning. How to talk to a real person who does not care about your architecture and just wants the app to open.
A month of real production traffic on WRDB taught me more about databases than a whole semester did. Not because the semester was wrong, but because production does not let you hand wave. The users are real and the bill is real.
The goal is not balance
I used to think the point was balance, some clean split between studying and building. It is not. The point is letting each one make the other cheaper.
I study the theory behind a problem I already hit in code, so it sticks. I build with patterns I first met in a lecture, so I am not inventing everything from zero. When it works, the degree and the work stop competing for my time and start paying each other back.
Some weeks are still a mess. That part is fine. You do not need a perfect system, you need to keep both plates spinning long enough for them to teach you something.