from Hacker News

New Coursera class, "Startup Engineering"

by msprague on 1/21/13, 2:28 AM with 27 comments

  • by balajiss on 1/21/13, 4:03 AM

    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.

  • by danso on 1/21/13, 3:40 AM

    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...

  • by mendocino on 1/21/13, 3:11 AM

    > 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

  • by msprague on 1/21/13, 2:28 AM

    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

  • by jtchang on 1/21/13, 3:09 AM

    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.

  • by jiggy2011 on 1/21/13, 4:44 AM

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

  • by hnwh on 1/21/13, 2:48 AM

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

  • by cing on 1/21/13, 2:45 PM

    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?

  • by aorshan on 1/21/13, 4:26 AM

    Definitely signed up for this. Should be really interesting.

  • by dschiptsov on 1/21/13, 3:51 PM

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