Berkeley edX: Software as a Service
Some background: One of the things my company and many others are doing is moving to a more SaaS oriented business model. It’s a growing space in software engineering, and as we see more and more cloud based services I can only expect this trend to continue. SaaS provides many benefits, especially for a rapidly changing product as ours. SaaS would allow us to roll out features to clients quickly and in a scalable manner, ensuring some level of consistency across all clients without having to worry about which version a client was on, which version fixed a bug they had, etc. We recently made some changes to our software that made it technically feasible to use a SaaS methodology, allowing us to run multiple clients off one instance of our product. We don’t currently have that set up, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction.
So with all this in mind, when I saw that Berkeley edX was offering a course on SaaS, I figured I’d take it. It’s taught using TDD, Agile development, and Rails, all of which I’m familiar and use both at work and at home. The software engineering course I took at university wasn’t very helpful to me, and I thought it might be fun to take a course that appears to be more in line with my expectations for a software engineering course.
I’ve gone through the first two lectures, most of which is just a general overview of what SaaS is, and agile development is, and how they contrast to other practices. The next two lectures are available, along with the first homework and quiz, but I haven’t had time to go through them yet. I think the course will be a great experience, as it’s only about 6-12 hours of work a week for five weeks. There is a follow up, more advanced course that I plan on taking afterwards. I’m hoping there will be other contemporary CS classes offered via edX. I think it’s a great opportunity for students and graduates to see a different aspect of software engineering that doesn’t seem to be taught in typical classes very often.
I’ll do another post at the end of the course with my thoughts on how it went, and any new practices or concepts I learned. You can still register for the course if you’re interested, or check out the intro video.