Course on Running Computer Services

Inspired by Jessie Frazelle's Tweet "... any college CS courses require running services"

I'm curious if any college CS courses require running services (outside messing around in a lab) nowadays?

Debugging intuition comes from experience & is built up from years & years of seeing systems fail in different ways.

Big O isn't going to save you when prod is down.

Jessie Frazelle

The goal of this repository is to collect content for a course that anyone capable and willing can start using it to teach students. The course will cover:

  • Basics of CS, Operating Systems, Processes, Networking and Storage
  • How to get started by running their own services at their home lab
  • How to simulate various commonly occuring failure scenarios
  • The process of debugging
  • Blameless Retrospectives
  • How to get "clients" that are willing to let the students intern for their services
  • How to pay forward by enhancing this course

The Goal for the Professor

Again inspired by Jessie Frazelle's Tweet "I want to teach this class because"

  • It will be super fun
  • In the moment kids will hate it and not understand why this is so hard
  • Ten years after they'll (hopefully) say its the one CS class they still use everyday
  • Getting to be the professor everyone respects but from time to time they strongly dislike them and so they have a tension between respect and hate.

Jessie Frazelle

Next Steps

  • Come up with course structure
  • Add initial content
  • Get "customers"