This past quarter I’ve been teaching CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. Last week was the final exam and tonight I finished submitting the grades. (The average grade was 88.) This was a great experience. Stanford is an inspirational place to be. The students are very smart – one of the undergraduates in my class is already working with a VC up on Sandhill Road. As I’ve found before, I learn a lot when I teach. This was especially true given the questions from these students. I’ve never taught an entire quarter before. Teaching three classes per week while developing a new curriculum took a lot of time. I’m thankful to Google for giving me time to do this.
The material from the class is posted on the class web site. Slides from all of my lectures, including material from my next book, can be found there. There are also slides from my amazing guest lecturers:
- Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) – Performance Challenges for the Open Web
- Lindsey Simon (Google) – Front End Kung Fu (no slides; this was more of an action movie/lecture)
- Bill Scott (Netflix) – High Performance Web Pages – Real World Examples: Netflix Case Study
- Doug Crockford (Yahoo!) – Ajax Performance
- Robert Johnson (Facebook) – Fast Data at Massive Scale – lessons learned at Facebook
I’ve posted the midterm and final exams, along with the ans-wers. The slides and tests provide a thorough coverage of web performance. The average grade on the final was 94. Give it a whirl and let me know how you do.
Kevin Le | 17-Dec-08 at 7:25 am | Permalink
Steve,
Your midterm and final are password-protected. Do you mean for the public to try these or only for your students?
Steve Souders | 17-Dec-08 at 7:39 am | Permalink
I fixed the links. Thanks!
Brad Neuberg | 17-Dec-08 at 10:22 am | Permalink
Hi Steve, great idea for a course. Any surprising things or trends you learned from the students themselves?
Steve Souders | 19-Dec-08 at 4:29 pm | Permalink
Hi, Brad. The most consistent comment was the desire for more applied classes like this one. There is a surprising lack of classes dealing with the Web at Stanford. John Ousterhout is there now and will help develop a web curriculum. There was good interest in my class, but even bigger when I brought in the guest lecturers, esp. Bobby Johnson from Facebook. I was pleased to see a number of students were involved with working in industry either with their own startups or projects through Stanford. Despite the lack of classes, these students were definitely well informed about the latest web technologies.
Dave S. | 23-Dec-08 at 10:13 am | Permalink
Steve,
Great Tests and Course. I really wish my college had applied courses as well. They always said the concepts and abstractions laid down the framework for learning all the applications, but without real world examples, it was all just hand-waving magic. I’ve stumbled across most of the issues in these tests over the last year or so, and it was a nice refresher to go through. Is there any plan to cover a javascript performance class? I can’t tell you how crappy most javascript is on the web right now.
Steve Souders | 23-Dec-08 at 10:55 am | Permalink
@Dave S: My next book (due Q2 ‘09) will have several chapters on JavaScript performance. I’m also aware of discussions to put together a series of JavaScript workshops that would include performance tips. More on that in Q1.
Mike | 06-Jan-09 at 4:13 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the course Steve! It was really very helpful… it cleared up and expanded immensely on a few hazy ideas I had about web performance from the end-user perspective (rather than the ‘how many servers do we need to buy’ perspective). And filled in gaps in my general understanding about http, JS, etc. Thanks much!