Startup Engineering

Stanford's new course on building a startup from the ground up. Offered on campus and online, taught by successful entrepreneurs. Start here.

Syllabus

Week	Topic	Assignment
1/7	Overview, Introduction and Quickstart	HW1
1/14	Tools: Unix (VMs, IAAS/PAAS, shell) and the Command Line (Text Editors, DVCS, Dotfiles)	HW2
1/21	Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, Wireframing, Market Research	HW3
1/28	Backend: SSJS, Databases, Frameworks, Data Pipelines	HW4
2/4	APIs: Client-side templating, HTTP, SOA/REST/JSON, API as BizDev	HW5
2/11	Devops: Testing, Deployment, CI, Monitoring, Performance	HW6
2/18	Dev Scaling: DRY, Reading/Reviewing/Documenting Code, Parallelizing	Project
2/25	Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization	Project
3/4	Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting	Project
3/11	Summary and Wrapup	Project
3/18	Demo Week (Demo Day on March 22, 2013)	Project

About the Course

The first half of the course will cover modern software engineering principles with a focus on mobile HTML5 development, taught via lectures, quizzes, and programming assignments. Guest lecturers from top Silicon Valley startups including Uber, Square, Stripe, AirBnb, Twilio, Taskrabbit, Judicata, Counsyl, Asana, Heroku, and Twitter will bring these concepts to life with real engineering problems from their work.

In the second half, you will apply these concepts to develop a simple command line application, expose it as a webservice, and then integrate other students' command line apps and webservices together with yours to create a mobile HTML5 app as a final project. Lectures will continue in the second half, but will be focused on the design, marketing, and logistical aspects of creating and scaling a startup. No other homework will be given in the second half to permit full focus on the final project.

Grading will be based on class participation (10%), homework (40%), and the final project (50%). The best final projects in each category (e.g. genomics, transportation, law, etc.) will qualify for prizes sponsored by startups.

Background

Familiarity with basic programming at the level of Stanford's CS106B is required, and some exposure to HTML, CSS, and Javascript will also be helpful. To get a sense of the energy humming through Silicon Valley, the following reading is also highly recommended:

• First, for the big picture see Why Software is Eating the World, The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing, and Internet Trends.
• Next, look at these articles on Stanford's Facebook class, The Social Network, and Massively Collaborative Mathematics.
• Finally, read Startup = Growth and as much of the CS183 notes as you can.

This class takes up where CS183 left off, putting theory into practice. Here's a more formal description from the Stanford Bulletin:

Spiritual sequel to Peter Thiel's CS183 course on startups. A new course that bridges the gap between academic computer science and production software engineering. Fast-paced introduction to key tools and techniques (command line, dotfiles, text editor, distributed version control, debugging, testing, documentation, reading code, deployments), featuring guest appearances by senior engineers from successful startups and large-scale academic projects including Uber, Square, Stripe, AirBnB, Twilio, Taskrabbit, Judicata, Counsyl, Asana, Heroku, and Twitter. Over the course of the class, students will build a command line application, expose it as a web service, and then link other students' applications and services together to build an HTML5 mobile app. General principles are illustrated through modern Javascript and the latest web technologies, including Node, Backbone, Coffeescript, Bootstrap, Git, and Github. Prerequisites: Basic computer science as per CS106B. Recommended: some familiarity with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Instructors