[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Stanford cs 153 help
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Ask HN: Stanford cs 153 help
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&filter-
coursestatus-
Active=on&page=0&catalog=&academicYear=&q=CS+153&collapse= email:
anjney at alumni dot stanford edu if you prefer to share thoughts
privately. thank you in advance for any and all help
Author : anjneymidha
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-12-20 22:04 UTC (56 minutes ago)
| qm2crossing wrote:
| kyle kingsbury/aphyr of jepsen seems like an exemplar of #1
| anjneymidha wrote:
| this is an awesome rec thank you
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 2/
|
| 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.
| orionblastar wrote:
| We are all nerds because we love the technology, science, and
| math behind it.
| anjneymidha wrote:
| this is exactly the type of pointer i was hoping for, thank you
| huevosabio wrote:
| 1) you should reach out to the Convex.dev folks. They have built
| a solid infra platform, and their backend is open sourced(ish).
| They are ex-Dropbox as well. And finally they love to share!
|
| 2) I think multiplayer games could be interesting! Lots of meat
| while still having a lot of space to calibrate the scope.
| anjneymidha wrote:
| convex is really elegant and now that you mention it,
| multiplayer games like their ai-town agent sim is such a great
| fit for the class - thank you
| joschi03 wrote:
| 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).
| slaucon wrote:
| 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
| randomcatuser wrote:
| i didn't know you could do that! how does one volunteer to teach
| a course?
| tayo42 wrote:
| couldn't find the syllabus
|
| deploy something like cassandra and make a system that can update
| the kernel on the servers running the databases without downtime
| or losing data
|
| or come up with some distrubuted blob store thing/cdn for world
| wide users
|
| my whole career has been automating updates for software or
| operating systems lol
| jjoe wrote:
| Maybe reach out to Netflix's live streaming dept. since we all
| learn so much more from our own failures.
|
| Cheers!
| spenczar5 wrote:
| 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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