Ryan Eberhardt invited Xpanse to give a guest lecture on the last day of a summer session of Stanford CS 110, in that gap between real coursework and the final.
CS 110 is the second course in Stanford’s systems programming sequence. I loved taking it as a student. I loved CS 110 so much that I TAed it twice, even though it’s a really tough course to TA (the students are zillions of new undergrads, there’s a lot of assignments to give feedback on, and the material is pretty hard for them so office hours consist of a never-ending queue of students with questions). My professor Jerry Cain gave me an award for my TA work, so hopefully I did okay by them.
For this re-visit to CS 110, I introduced microservices, containerization, and orchestration. I gave the orientation to why they should care and who we were. Then two sharp coworkers talked about their daily tech of port scanning and functional programming. I concluded the lecture with hinting at the problems solved by Docker and Kubernetes (and the problems created by them), and I asked leading questions that extended some of the core ideas in CS 110: decoupling of concerns, each worker does one thing, pools of workers share a single point of entry, and request/response models.