Startup Engineering

Statement of accomplishement
Course taken on Jun 17th to Sep 9th 2013 at Coursera.org.

About the Course
Spiritual sequel to Peter Thiel's CS183 course on startups. 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. 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.

Created by Stanford University.

Course Syllabus
The syllabus is optimized to enable students to iterate on their final projects as soon as possible, with technical material in the first half of the class and entrepreneurial considerations in the second half.


 * Introduction and Quickstart
 * Tools: VMs, IAAS/PAAS, Unix Command Line, Text Editors, DCVS
 * Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, Wireframing, Market Research
 * Backend: SSJS, Databases, Frameworks, Data Pipelines
 * APIs: Client-side templating, HTTP, SOA/REST/JSON, API as BizDev
 * Devops: Testing, Deployment, CI, Monitoring, Performance
 * Dev Scaling: DRY, Reading/Reviewing/Documenting Code, Parallelizing
 * Founding: Conception, Composition, Capitalization
 * Business Scaling: Promotion, CAC/LTV/Funnel, Regulation, Accounting
 * Summary and Demo Week

Balaji S. Srinivasan, Co-Founder, Counsyl
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the co-founder of Counsyl, a genomics startup that began in a Stanford dorm room and now tests more than 2.5% of all US births. Counsyl won the Wall Street Journal'sInnovation Award for Medicine, was named one of Scientific American's Top 10 World Changing Ideas, raised more than $65M in funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund among others, and has become one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world. Prior to co-founding Counsyl, Dr. Srinivasan taught data mining, statistics, and computational biology in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford. He was an NDSEG, NSF, and VIGRE fellow and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Reviews Genetics.

Vijay S. Pande, Professor, Departments of Chemistry and (by courtesy) Computer Science and Structural Biology
Vijay S. Pande is a professor of chemistry, structural biology, and computer science (by courtesy) at Stanford University and the director of Stanford's Biophysics Program. As a teenager he was the third employee of Naughty Dog, which went on to ship 6.8 million copies of Crash Bandicoot for the Sony Playstation. Currently he is the founder and director of Folding@Home, a massive distributed computing project that integrates volunteered computers and PlayStations to perform simulations of protein folding and computational drug design for disease research. Folding@Home was the fastest distributed supercomputer in the world for several years and is the current Guinness world-record holder for "most powerful distributed computing network". Professor Pande's current work includes novel simulation methods for high-precision drug binding affinity calculations, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers.