Fake Flickr
- Category: Software Engineering
- Purpose: Semester-Long Class Project
- Project date: August 2022 - Dec 2022
- GitHub URL: GitHub
- Class Description: "...An upper-division elective that was designed to introduce students to site reliability engineering through hands-on assignments requiring teams to deploy, maintain, and scale a working software system, done alongside readings and discussion of high-stakes episodes from the broader history of complex systems.", and the paper he published about the class is here
- Prof. Mikey Dickerson: A bit about my professor alumnus, here.
Managing Complex Systems
As a team of 4, we maintained a Flickr-like Java web app using Postgres and Tomcat on AWS EC2 instances. Over the course of the semester we integrated SSL, load balancing, and CICD, as well as New Relic/Data Dog/Pager Duty for an on-call schedule, which were necessary since the site's availability was a factor in our grade.
Some of the obstacles thrown at us include: error logs using up all of the memory, faulty git pushes, preparing our site to load balance 100,000 users at once, having to backfill our Postgres database, etc. It was hell, but a rewarding hell.
In addition to SRE training, we also studied managing complex systems in general, and we dived into the theories and practices of how catastrophic logistical disasters grow, form, and are "resolved". How do human structures reflect the disasters they create? Does complexity = security? Can blame ever bring resolution? Mikey, an ex-Googler & ex-White Houser, was an once in a lifetime professor to learn from and hang with.