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&filt...

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

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475526

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475526