In 2024, eleven years into the career it describes, I finished my computer science degree at NDSU. People hear that and assume a career change story. It’s the opposite: it’s a finishing story — an open loop from before the first set, finally closed, at an age where nobody could make me do it and the market plainly didn’t require it. Which is exactly why it mattered.

Why bother? Three honest reasons.

The unfinished thing has weight. Anyone carrying an almost-done anything knows this. It doesn’t block your path; it just rides in the pack, a few pounds of “someday,” every single portage. Eleven years is long enough to learn that the pack only gets lighter one way.

Practice without theory has a ceiling. By 2024 I’d shipped more production systems than most graduating classes combined — but shipping teaches you what works, and theory teaches you why, and the why is what transfers to problems you haven’t met yet. Taking algorithms and theory courses while carrying a decade of production scars is a completely different education than taking them at twenty. Every abstraction had a face. I’d rank it among the best professional experiences I’ve had, which no one is more surprised by than me.

The credential closes a mouth. Not mine — the doubt’s. A consultancy trades on verifiable proof: published prices, public usage counters, counts that reconcile. The degree is one more claim a stranger can check, from the institution my hometown built. NDSU computer science, class of 2024, first set 2013 — the resume reads out of order and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The long way around is still a route.

And doing it at NDSU meant the finishing happened in Fargo — the place that trained me got to stamp the diploma. There’s a rightness to that I won’t dress up in a metaphor. Some circles just want closing.

Next: The fleet era — millions of visits, hundreds of sites.