New Coursera class, "Startup Engineering" | Hacker News Reader

New Coursera class, "Startup Engineering"

coursera.org

195 pointsmsprague27 comments

Primary instructor here. Was going to wait to post this to HN till I had more material up, but please check out http://startup.stanford.edu.

We'll have a bunch of speakers over the course of the class from more than a dozen of the top startups in the Valley (Square, Uber, Stripe, AirBnB, etc.) to round out the technical material. Agreed with one commenter that there are indeed a lot of TLAs, but that's for the SEO ;)

The class is being taught on the Stanford campus now from January through March, and the lecture notes will be open sourced (probably under AGPL) in April. This will provide a free textbook to combine with the MOOC itself, so that those in the developing world have access.

Any constructive feedback would be most appreciated, and my email is balajis at stanford dot edu.

Looking forward for your course on Coursera! By the way, while looking at your introduction slide on http://startup.stanford.edu I've noticed that "Frontend JS Framework" and "Frontend CSS Framework" are in the wrong order (Page 11, Column name "Type").

Thanks. Will fix this and a few other typos (DCVS -> DVCS).

Sorry to steal your karma! I just saw this and got too excited

I signed up for the class. In the confirmation email is a pitch they should've used on the class page:

Finally, perhaps one anecdote will give a sense of what you will gain from the course. In 2007 a relatively small Stanford class of 75 students wrote apps for the then-nascent Facebook platform. Within ten weeks, the students had amassed more than sixteen million users and one million dollars in revenue. And that was five years ago, before the worldwide installation of hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets. What will happen today once we have 100,000+ students learning startup engineering in parallel, building apps with mobile platforms as a first class target?

The link it refers to is: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?pa...

Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just so many more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the attention of eyeballs.

That being said, I have enrolled :)

Good idea. Will update the page text to include this in our next revision.

I was in that class, and wrote an app that got 1 million users. That sounds good, but honestly, it was a mistake on Facebook's part. They made it much too easy for people to spam their friends. The most successful apps in the class tended to be ones where you just sent a "hug" or a "kiss" to your friends, that kind of thing. The lessons of the class (optimizing a viral loop) are still useful, but it pains me to see anyone overly impressed by it.

> Learn the engineering skills needed to build a technology startup from the ground up.

"Learn the engineering skills needed to build a web startup from the ground up." FTFY

I guess the web isn't technology...

Technology is not the web

You don't know what technology is, do you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology

I think the point he was making is along the lines of "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares"

Looks pretty cool:

Syllabus:

Introduction and Quickstart Tools: VMs, IAAS/PAAS, Unix Command Line, Text Editors, DCVS Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, Wireframing, Market Research Backend: SSJS, Databases, Frameworks, Data Pipelines APIs: Client-side templating, HTTP, SOA/REST/JSON, API as BizDev Devops: Testing, Deployment, CI, Monitoring, Performance Dev Scaling: DRY, Reading/Reviewing/Documenting Code, Parallelizing Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting Summary and Demo Week

Wow the topics look pretty solid. I've never met Dr. Srinivasan but his credentials look impressive.

What I like most about the topics are that they are focused on what is needed from the tech side when starting a company.

In fact I would argue that a technical cofounder should be able to offer pros/cons and at least a few suggestions for each of these topics. Being semi opinionated about these types of topics is sometimes what separates a senior engineer from a junior one. (But not blindly opinionated).

For examples:

- VMs - Big leader is VMWare followed by a host of others. Almost any cloud service will be based around some form of virtualization such as Xen. Most startups use VMs because it is cheaper than buying regular hardware.

- IAAS/PAAS - Talk a bit about Amazon EC2 for infrastructure services. Jump into stuff like Heroku and why it is different than EC2.

- Text Editors - Pick whatever one you like. Don't be afraid to learn a new one if it helps your productivity.

- Frameworks - Use one. Don't write your own unless your startup is predicated on selling a framework to developers.

Etc...etc.

bth, the set of topics seems like an amalgamation of buzzwords and TLAs. I seriously doubt they can go into any sort of depth if they are all covered.

Sometimes a view of the entire landscape puts everything into perspective enough that it's much easier to go deeper on your own into the areas that you need the most.

VMs are initially cheaper (say AWS), in the long run, your own server stack is if you can manage it for a reasonable cost. VMs are basically leases.

This looks like an extremely expansive menu of topics, pretty much anything on that list could be an entire 10 week course in itself.

Right, the idea is a survey course with links for depth. Many of these are areas you need to have at least some familiarity with at the inception of a new company, and they really aren't taught well (even at a survey level) within academia at the present time. This is a first step towards remedying that; hopefully more in-depth courses will follow.

This is a powerful approach. I know a lot of really brilliant people who want to "do a startup" but they don't have the tools and don't even know what tools they need to start building. Thanks in advance for teaching this course!

this looks perfect for all those who "want to do a startup"

Sincere question though, I imagine the linking too the pre-req cs198 Standford course work, that even doing, e.g. Udacity intro to CS101, Learn Python the Hard Way may be too "light" of knowledge to sign up.

Should I try and gear up C++/burn through as much as possible of: https://cs198.stanford.edu/cs106/ (I did some C++ in highschool YEARS ago, but was mostly a mIRC script kiddie).

In preparation for this course to be valuable to a non-coder (that's learning), like myself?

I'd say don't waste your time going through C++. Python is a great language to get started with, and will serve well for many web focused startups, as well as with dev ops and systems administration. This course will likely emphasize giving you the broad base of tools and habits you need to succeed, not drilling code syntax and algorithms into your head (which you can always do later). So imho, do your CS101 and dive in. // CTO, and tech advisor to several startups

I find it unusual that Vijay Pande is co-instructing this course. Of course I'm intrigued because computational structural biology is my area of research, but is Dr. Pande really qualified to teach about the topics in the syllabus?

Definitely signed up for this. Should be really interesting.

Bringing up node.js REPL: - No, thank you.)

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