TL;DR

I moved to Ireland on August 30, 2026 to start an MSc in Software Engineering at the University of Limerick, and I'm still working full-time as a Platform Engineer at Appwrite. It's been just over a month, my first midterm is literally tomorrow, and enough has happened that I wanted to write it down: how I got here, why I came, and what comes next.

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Why a Master's, and why now

Not many people know this, but I started working at Appwrite while I was still doing my bachelor's at Bennett University in India. I joined as an intern for six months and then moved to full-time. By the time I graduated in May 2026, I'd already been at Appwrite for a year and a half.

Doing both at once never felt like a compromise. I loved the work and I loved studying, and the two fed into each other in a way I wasn't ready to give up. So instead of picking one, I signed up for another degree.

There's a second reason, and it has more to do with where the industry is right now. With AI, you can prompt almost any feature into existence. It's very easy (and I'm guilty of this too) to take a request from a product person, paste it into a Claude Code session and ship whatever comes out, without putting any real thought into it.

That's exactly why I think the fundamentals matter more now, not less. Knowing how to design a system, and why some designs hold up while others fall apart, is the part an agent can't do for you. One month in, I'm reading Martin Fowler, Grady Booch and the Gang of Four on design patterns. Yes, I'm only now properly meeting these people, and yes, I'm enjoying it a lot.

Work teaches you a lot, but mostly it teaches you whatever this week's problem needs. A degree gives me room to step back and learn the reasoning behind patterns I already use every day, and to put names to things I'd only ever picked up by osmosis. Once you can name a pattern, you can spot it, question it and explain it to someone else, which matters a lot more when an agent is writing half the code.

Why Ireland

Ireland is tiny compared to India, but it punches well above its size. I kept hearing about new startups coming out of it, the tech scene keeps growing, and most importantly the education looked hands-on and practical. That was especially true of the University of Limerick, which is where I ended up.

Dublin was a close second. It's where most international students go, it has more universities, and it's a much denser city. Limerick felt calmer, and that was exactly what I wanted.

The visa took a long time. A very long time. It was my first visa application, so I had no idea what to expect. Collecting documents alone took weeks, mostly because my university was slow to issue my provisional degree. Once I applied, the decision took about five weeks and arrived uncomfortably close to the start of my course. If you're applying, start earlier than you think you need to.

Keeping Appwrite in the picture

I've always been open with the team about my plans, and they've backed every decision I've made. Working at Appwrite has never felt like something I had to force. I get to build technology I care about with what is honestly the best team I could ask for, and it has always felt like home. (Literally, since I work remotely. But still, I've never once wanted to quit.) Thankfully the team felt the same way about me, so the work continues!

What has changed is how I work. Lectures often clash with my sync meetings, so a lot more of my work is async now. That has forced better habits on me: planning everything ahead, keeping blockers to a minimum, and communicating more clearly.

The communication part is the one I feel most. I have fewer hours to unblock someone, so if a misunderstanding is my fault, it costs more than it used to. An async message has to stand on its own: what I did, where I'm stuck and what I need from whom. If I leave a gap, someone waits half a day for me to come out of a lecture and fill it.

Being fully remote has plenty of perks, and being able to do all of this from a different country is one of them :D

The move

Ireland's housing crisis is as bad as everyone says. Just a few days ago, students in Dublin were protesting over exactly this. I was lucky to get on-campus accommodation, so I can walk to my classes and make it to the university gym or a tennis session at a few minutes' notice.

The thing nobody really prepares you for is the weather. Everyone warns you about the rain, but it doesn't land until you live in it. "Constant rain" sounds like a proper downpour, and usually it isn't. It's more of a background process: a light drizzle that never quite stops and keeps the roads permanently wet. Then, at the most inconvenient moments, like when I need to walk to class, it turns into a small storm.

I'm also still getting used to cooking for myself, doing my own groceries and learning a whole new set of food brands. A lot of things taste better here. I will say, though, that restaurant food and street food were better back in India :P

What I'm looking forward to

There's so much here I want to try. I've already started playing tennis again, which I played a lot in high school but hadn't touched in about four years. With the courts a two-minute walk from my room, it's very hard to find excuses.

I'm also going to far more events than I used to. At a small computer society event, I built a heartbeat monitor, my first ever hardware project. I spend my days on servers and APIs, so wiring up a sensor on a breadboard and watching my own pulse appear on a tiny screen was a completely different kind of fun.

Events aren't limited to Limerick either. I went up to Dublin for the MongoDB student hackathon during Dublin AI Week, which was a great excuse to see a bit more of the country and meet students from other universities, including one from Trinity College Dublin who had a much shorter trip than I did.

There's also a real overlap between what I'm studying and what I build at Appwrite. Modules like Advanced Software Design are all about writing enterprise-grade software that is reusable, extensible and maintainable. That's not abstract for me. Appwrite is a large, open source codebase that a lot of people depend on, and every shortcut we take there gets copied, extended and maintained for years.

A lot of what I'm reading about already exists in that codebase in some form. Utopia's database library, which Appwrite is built on, gives you one interface with a separate adapter for each database engine underneath, which is pretty much a textbook example from the patterns books. Learning the theory behind code I already work in every day makes both of them click a lot faster, and I'm excited to bring more of it back into my work.

One month in

It's busy. Lectures, assignments and Appwrite all want my time, and there's a midterm tomorrow that I should probably be revising for instead of writing this :P But it's the good kind of busy. What I learn in class connects straight back to my work, and outside of both I'm doing things I hadn't done in years. Ask me again after exams, but so far I'm really glad I made the jump.

Thank You

To the Appwrite team, for backing this from the very first conversation and making it possible to keep doing work I love from a new country. To UL Student Life, for Wolfie, the Cliffs of Moher and making a new place feel welcoming so quickly. And to my family and friends back home. India is four and a half hours ahead, so my evenings are your late nights, and our calls have moved to my mornings. Thank you for working around that so I can be here.

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You can check out my profile to learn more about me: https://www.chiragaggarwal.tech/

If you're thinking about studying in Ireland or juggling work and a degree, hit me up on any of my socials. I'm always up for a chat :D