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

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.

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.

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).

this is exactly the type of pointer i was hoping for, thank you