For 25 years, code has been my passion as well as my profession. Then agentic coding arrived (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) and that skill, taken on its own, became a commodity. That’s not bad news: I haven’t had this much fun writing software in years, ever since I embraced vibe coding. But it made me realize something: to stay relevant for the next 25 years of my career, I need to broaden my horizons.
So last year I started an academic path: the L31 Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at UniPegaso, to finally get the “piece of paper” I had never earned… and to settle the score with an impostor syndrome that has kept me company throughout my career.
But the first-year exams flew by in six months, so in March I also enrolled in a university advanced training program: 30 ECTS credits in three months for “Foundations of Economic Sciences” at Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi. Economics! Completely new ground for me, but a subject I had wanted to explore for a long time.
Today the grade for the first of the three Economics exams came in: I got a 27 (out of 30) in History of Economic Thought. Four open-ended questions, four answers to write out by hand, pen on paper, four dense pages in non-technical Italian… I hadn’t done that since my high school final essay in 1998! It felt strange, but it felt good. To me this 27 is worth more than the 30 cum laude I got in Algorithms and Data Structures (there I was playing at home).
One detail of the studying stayed with me. The video lectures for History of Economic Thought are still those of Prof. Giovanni Montefusco, who passed away prematurely in 2022; the course is now in the hands of Prof. Simone La Bella. I studied Aristotle, Smith, Marx, and Keynes in the words of a teacher who is no longer at the lectern but keeps on teaching.
It’s a note of permanence that struck me precisely while I was studying to find my bearings in a professional world that changes very fast. Long live online universities, if only for details like this.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, in Italian.
Last modified on 2026-04-27