First Week of Classes

September 26, 2008 11:48 pm | 4 Comments

I finished my first week teaching CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. It went well. The class is settling in at 35 students plus another 10 watching remotely through the Stanford Center for Professional Development. It’s 2/3 undergrad, 1/3 grad. The students are smart and ask great questions.

I’ve laid out the class schedule for the quarter. I post the slides before each lecture. Here are links to the slides from this week’s classes:

• Introduction (ppt, GDoc)
• The Importance of Frontend Performance (ppt, GDoc)
• HTTP and Web 100 Performance Profile (ppt, GDoc)

Today we kicked off the first class project. Each student picks five top web sites and records different performance stats in our Web 100 Performance Profile spreadsheet. We’ll update this again at the end of the quarter and analyze any trends.

I’m traveling to Boston next week for The Ajax Experience and won’t be able to teach class. I’m excited to say I’ve lined up three great industry leaders, speakers, and friends to appear as guest lecturers. Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) is doing a talk on “Performance Challenges for the Open Web”. Lindsey Simon (Google) is going to provide an introduction to CSS and talk about the balance between design and performance. Bill Scott (Netflix) has prepped a talk entitled “High Performance Examples from the Real World”, sure to contain great anecdotes and lessons learned from his work at Yahoo! and Netflix. Luckily the class is videotaped, so I can watch their classes when I get back.

See you in Boston!