Saw this interesting course offered online by Stanford University callled Startup Engineering. Basically, the course goes through various technologies involved in getting a startup off the ground using services like Heroku, node.js, Amazon web services and others. The goal of the course is to get a startup off the ground in the duration of the course. More detail at the link or in the extract of the course summary below.
Startup Engineering
Startup Engineering
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As described in detail here, the first part of the course will cover modern software engineering principles with a focus on mobile HTML5 development, taught via in-class lectures with online questions and programming assignments. Guest lecturers from top Silicon Valley startups (including Uber, Coinbase, Meteor, Square, Stripe, AirBnb, Twilio, Taskrabbit, Judicata, Counsyl, Twitter, and Asana) will bring these concepts to life with real engineering problems from their work.
In the second part of the course, you will run a crowdfunder to attract pre-orders and/or social media attention for your startup product. Specifically, over the course of the homework assignments, you will progressively develop a node.js-based crowdfunding application and populate it with your own startup idea, which you may have brought with you at the outset or else developed over the course of the class. Your crowdfunding app will be prototyped as a simple command line application, exposed as a webservice, and (at your discretion) integrated with other students' webservices to create a simple crowdfunding site. This site will be designed for a mobile HTML5 target via use of Twitter Bootstrap, will support basic social sharing functions, and will optionally accept Bitcoin for payment.
Lectures will continue in the second part of the course, but will be focused on the design, marketing, and logistical aspects of operating your crowdfunder. Some may decide to spend this time on marketing; others on design; others on making an impressive demo for a crowdfunder video. But all projects will be ranked by (at least) two scalar criteria within each category: the number of Bitcoin raised during the crowdfunder period and/or the number of social media shares of the crowdfunder project (see slides for details). No other homework will be given in the second half to allow you to fully focus on your crowdfunding project.
