Visual Agility: Why We Model
Design of complex systems is hard -- wickedly hard! It takes all the cognitive assist we can muster. Trade-offs must be made because there is interaction -- not just interaction among components to create a capability, but interaction among properties. And interaction between the system and its users and containing systems(-of-systems). And more! These systems are evolving -- the more agile, the more we try to take this co-evolution, this learning across boundaries, this symmathesy, into account.
Jul 19 2024A Philosophical Look at System Dynamics
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Spring of 1977. In this lecture, Donella Meadows takes on a more philosophical concept. How can we bring ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we make as systems thinkers? She asserts that models are a set of assumptions. Donella Meadows defines some of these system dynamics assumptions (such as causal relationships and feedback loops) in this video.
Apr 25 2024Workflows, a new abstraction for distributed systems
For the past 45 years, the database systems community has enjoyed an unparalleled developer experience: Database Transactions mitigate challenges such as failure on a platform level, entirely eliminating these challenges on an applications level. Unfortunately, the distributed systems community has not enjoyed a similar developer experience: There was no equivalent abstraction that mitigates challenges like failure on a platform level. However, many companies, including Snap, Uber, and Netflix, are adopting a new paradigm: Workflows. Workflows are to distributed systems what transactions are to databases. This talk explores how Workflow Systems mitigate challenges on a platform level and provide a developer experience for distributed systems that rivals the developer experience for databases, allowing you to literally code as if failure does not even exist!
Abstraction Architecture Design Video
Nov 7 2022Unconditional Code • Michael Feathers
Many systems are full of error checks and conditional logic. They introduce discontinuities that make reasoning difficult. In this talk, Michael Feathers will present a conceptual framework for dealing with errors, conditionality and decision making at the level of code, architecture and user interface. Often by changing design and revisiting requirements we can make various error cases impossible, and make code and architecture simpler as well as more robust.
Mar 18 2021Programming Abstractions
Julie Zelenski gives an introduction to the course, recursion, algorithms, dynamic data structures, and data abstraction; she also introduced the significance of programming and gives her opinion of what makes 106B "great;" C++ is introduced, too.
Abstraction Course Playlist Stanford Video
Feb 16 2016