University after hours: from avoiding maths to enjoying data

When I was finishing high school, my main criterion for choosing a university was not its ranking, campus, or whether it was public or private.

It was much simpler: I did not want to take an entrance exam in mathematics.

I knew I wanted to study software engineering, mostly web development at the time. I briefly considered moving to Denmark to study at Aarhus University and see where it might take me. Then I met my future wife—at least, that’s the plan—and staying in Czechia suddenly felt like the right choice.

That led me to Unicorn University. The admission process was a motivation call and tuition. After barely making it through my maths graduation exam, that was exactly the level of mathematics I wanted from an admissions process.

This is the story of how that choice led to a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree completed in half the usual time, and—unexpectedly—a genuine interest in maths and data. Most of it happened after work.

1. 2020

   Smartmockups, NFCtron, and the start of university

   I finished high school, started my bachelor’s programme, and discovered that my new “part-time” job at NFCtron was not going to stay part-time.

2. 2023

   Bachelor’s finished; master’s and CPO began

   I defended a ticketing system as my bachelor’s thesis, continued directly into the master’s programme, and took responsibility for NFCtron’s products as CPO.

3. January 2025

   Master’s thesis defended

   After compressing four semesters into two and writing most of the thesis in a final December sprint, I finished with an Ing. degree.

4. May 2025

   A different chapter

   A few months later, I became CEO of NFCtron. University was finally no longer running as a permanent background process in my head.

The small remote job that was not small

Before NFCtron, I worked irregularly for Smartmockups, a company from Liberec—my hometown—building a browser-based product mockup tool. I was not developing the application; I was creating the graphical mockups that people could place their designs into.

The work became increasingly ad hoc and difficult to plan around. From my limited view, I thought the company might be running into the ground. I only understood the situation later: the founders had an acquisition occupying their attention. Smartmockups became part of Canva in February 2021, and they eventually moved to Australia.

I sometimes joke that I could have ended up there too. Good for them—but I am also glad that I went looking for something else.

What I found was NFCtron. I expected a manageable, remote, part-time development job alongside university. My first assignment corrected that assumption quickly.

So I built. For roughly two months I tried to keep producing mockups for Smartmockups at the same time. It was not working. NFCtron needed my full attention, and I left the other job.

The bachelor’s programme started alongside all of this.

A bachelor’s degree running beside the real work

The beginning was made easier by Covid. University was remote, NFCtron was remote, and I did not have to spend time moving between the two.

The software-engineering part of the programme often formalised things I already knew from practice. Sometimes the main revelation was simply learning the proper name for something I had already been doing. Mathematics was different. As expected, I struggled.

During the first semester, I was suspected of cheating on a test. It was never proven, but the situation still went through a disciplinary process. I did not receive the nine credits for the mathematics course and came closer to leaving university than I would have liked.

There is a strange ending to that episode. The same lecturer later supervised my master’s thesis. Opening Teams several years later to ask whether he would take it on felt slightly surreal: the previous messages between us were still from our argument about the disciplinary case. We managed to move on, and he became a genuinely engaged supervisor.

Once Covid restrictions eased, school and work both returned in person. I used a few hours or days off when I had to, then worked again from home. Whatever was happening at university, the product still had to ship. At that stage I was mainly a frontend developer, so the combination was demanding but manageable.

A thesis that the roadmap had no room for

Ticketing had become my main area at NFCtron. For my bachelor’s thesis, I chose something I already wanted to rebuild in the product but could not justify against the company roadmap: a web ticketing solution with interactive seat reservations.

I built it in my own time and used the same work for the thesis. That arrangement benefited both sides. The academic work had a real product problem behind it, and the product idea finally received the concentrated attention it had been missing.

The other discovery was LaTeX.

I passed the exams, defended the thesis, and finished in 2023 with a Bc. For me, it did not feel like the end. I wanted to complete the follow-up programme rather than leave the academic chapter half-open.

By then, NFCtron had changed

NFCtron was moving further into fintech. I had been part of closing our Mastercard partnership around card issuing, we were building a fully certified SoftPOS solution, and our long-term ambitions extended far beyond the product we had started with.

My role had changed too. As CPO, I was responsible for all our products. The workload—and my own commitment to the company—was higher than at any point during the bachelor’s programme.

I knew I did not want to keep work and university running in parallel for another two years. I also knew that the next several years at NFCtron were likely to become more demanding, not less. So I rearranged the master’s programme into two semesters instead of four.

My friend from university, Štěpán, helped make the idea feel less unreasonable. I found out that he was attempting the same compressed schedule. We did not finish everything on the same date—he submitted his thesis in a later term—but knowing somebody else had looked at four semesters and reached the same conclusion helped my motivation.

The timetable itself was occasionally absurd. I could attend a third-semester course before taking the first-semester subject it built upon. I moved between rooms full of fresh bachelor’s graduates in their early twenties and people in their thirties who were almost finished. There was no elegant order to it. The aim was simply to cover every requirement within the year.

It was too much, but it was also finite. I did not think of it as a productivity system or a model anybody should copy. University was the side quest; NFCtron remained the main one. The only plan was to get through the defined period without pretending that balance existed.

The main quest was not only about products. There were periods when internal relationships meant I also had to defend my role and my place in the company. The people involved have since left NFCtron. Honestly, that was probably best for everyone. I made it through and kept the work moving.

4 → 2

Semesters

The full master’s coursework compressed into one academic year.

5

Evenings each week

Classes after a normal day at NFCtron.

6–8

Workshop weekends

Additional sessions spread through the year.

Data that could be useful twice

For the master’s thesis, I again wanted work that would remain useful outside university. I had become increasingly curious about NFCtron’s data: what it could explain, what we could show organizers, and how little of its potential our B2B products had exposed so far.

The plan was to analyse one real festival. That required choosing an event whose organizers would approve the use of confidential production data. At the time I could not name it publicly. I can now: it was Vysočina Fest, part of Yashica Events—the company NFCtron Group acquired in July 2026.

I analysed more than 141,000 production transactions and built an interactive dashboard in Plotly Dash. The thesis combined software, statistics, product thinking, and a business question that mattered beyond the defence itself.

Something else had changed by then. Mathematics and data mining—subjects I expected to endure—became genuinely interesting. I even enjoyed some of the assignments, helped by the fact that I could write them beautifully in LaTeX. The person who had chosen a university partly to avoid a maths exam had somehow arrived here.

Four weeks and almost no Christmas

I completed the coursework and final subject exams during the second semester. The thesis was supposed to follow, but the festival season at NFCtron left very little space for it.

My plan was to submit and defend in January 2025. I contacted my supervisor in November with ideas and a proposed structure, but I did not properly start. After returning from a holiday in the Maldives on 5 December—a needed retreat after an exhausting year—the deadline stopped being theoretical. I had roughly four weeks left and perhaps five per cent of the thesis.

So the Christmas break was barely a break. I spent about two days at home, then returned to writing day and night. The repository tracked the progress more honestly than my memory does:

1. 14 Dec 2024

   4,125 words

   34 actual pages

2. 31 Dec 2024

   16,795 words

   105 actual pages

3. 7 Jan 2025

   17,065 words

   104 final pages

Near the end, the document was almost ready to print and hand in. I opened the registration page to choose a January defence date—and saw that the deadline to register had been at the end of October.

I had completely forgotten. I thought I had already registered. For a few hours, all the work felt wasted.

Then I contacted my supervisor and university support. They treated it as a solvable problem and let me register late for a fee. That responsiveness was one part of private university I genuinely appreciated: when something administrative went wrong, there was somebody willing to talk to me rather than simply point at the deadline.

I submitted, showed up, and defended.

My supervisor was excited by the combination of technical implementation and practical business value. The committee, made up largely of statisticians, was more reserved. Their main criticism was the bibliography: the thesis used roughly fifteen sources rather than the forty or so they expected. From an academic perspective, that was a fair weakness, even if much of the relevant material was internal and specific to our system.

I passed. Not with a red diploma, but with a diploma, useful experience, and a much clearer sense of what I wanted to explore next.

What I actually took from it

The titles matter to me, but they are not the most useful outcome.

The bachelor’s thesis taught me how much I enjoy documenting technical work when I control the tools. The master’s opened a deeper interest in mathematics, data, and later AI. Both forced me to slow down and explain work that, inside a company, would otherwise move directly from a conversation into a product.

Finishing also removed a quiet pressure that had been sitting in the back of my mind for years. There was no next exam, deadline, or unfinished academic promise waiting behind the workday. I could focus on NFCtron twice as much—which, in hindsight, was probably not the lesson about balance that university intended to teach me.

A few months later, we decided that I would lead NFCtron as CEO. The degree did not cause that decision. It simply closed one long-running chapter before another—growth, internal restructuring, and a different level of responsibility—began.

I can imagine studying again one day, perhaps for an MBA. It is not important right now. For the first time since 2020, university is no longer something I need to finish.