Ask HN: Stanford CS 153 help

66 points · anjneymidha · 9 days ago

hi hn - i'm volunteering at Stanford next quarter to co-teach cs 153 (infrastructure at scale) - a course i wish had existed during my undergrad years. rather than pure theory, it's focused on how large-scale systems actually work in production

the format combines hands-on projects with a speaker series. we've confirmed some solid speakers (Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, Matthew Prince from Cloudflare etc), but i'm also keen to bring in perspectives from folks who don't fit the standard mold. tbh, many of the best systems eng/devs/infra ppl i've worked with are pretty weird - they think differently, take unconventional paths, and often learn by obsessively building and breaking things rather than following traditional routes. i think it would be cool for the students to realize its a feature, not a bug, to be weirdly obsessive

if you're interested in this kind of stuff, i'd value your thoughts on:

1/ who are the fascinating/unsung heroes in infra/systems eng that students should learn from? especially interested in people who've solved hard scaling problems through unconventional thinking or unique approaches

2/ what kind of projects do you think would fun and meaningfully demonstrate real-world infrastructure challenges while still being achievable in an academic quarter?

prerequisites are CS106/CS111 level programming. draft syllabus here: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filt...

email: anjney at alumni dot stanford edu if you prefer to share thoughts privately. thank you in advance for any and all help

33 comments

spenczar5 · 9 days ago

Rachel by the Bay (https://rachelbythebay.com/) has long impressed me as someone who clearly is deep in the actual work of systems, day in and day out, and can write well about it.

Julia Evans has a wonderful approach as well, and has amazing talent for teaching: https://jvns.ca/

Kellan Elliott-McCrea (https://laughingmeme.org/) has given the world some of the better advice on the hardest parts of software scaling, which is of course scaling the human organizations. New grads are virtually always underestimating that part of the work; eventually you realize the hard problems are usually social and not technical.

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slaucon · 9 days ago

A progression of projects that comes to mind:

1) CI and IAC that deploy a web app running in a container

2) Add horizontal scaling and load balancer

3) Add long running tasks / scheduled task support

4) Deploys will likely break long running tasks. Implement blue/green or rolling deploys or some other sort of advanced deployment scheme

5) Implement rollbacks

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JohnMakin · 9 days ago

Build a multi-cloud architecture. And by this, I mean connect two cloud's networks without traversing the public internet to connect two applications running in each respective cloud. And then, put that into IaC. It sounds like not much, but the issues you uncover are pretty illuminating and it is a fantastic interview question to give to senior-ish infra guys to see how they approach it and the challenges they expect.

And you're right, we're all weird.

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joschi03 · 9 days ago

At multiple points in my career I stumbled upon stuff from Bredan Greg. He is highly skilled in large-scale distributed computing but also down to the nitty gritty details (bits).

acquiremoney · 2 days ago

Hey can someone who is not enrolled in degree attend the course on campus if they live in bay area? Also would they provide materials online? This looks like awesome course btw.

Murat dermibas comes to mind.