Harvard Systems Reading Group

systems reading group

at Harvard

reading about computer systems: the building blocks of our applications curation criteria:

- broad interest to systems and application designers - excellent quality of prose - opportunity for hands-on learning (i.e., actually used)

Week 1 (2022-09-03)

Computer networks “speedrun”

ethernet, 802.11 wifi, bluetooth, switched Ethernet, the Internet, brief intro to BGP, and IPv6

Week 2 (2022-09-10)

Networking redux

UDP, TCP, congestion control, TLS, HTTP, QUIC, multicast, WebRTC, and DNS

Week 3 (2022-09-17)

Concurrency in Swift

design of a structured concurrency model; for better, safer, clearer, and more reliable code

Week 4 (2022-09-24)

Distributed OLTP SQL

what makes scalable, robust distributed database engines so hard?

Week 5 (2022-10-16)

Fuzzing with AFL

how to find vulnerabilities in complex software, and validate its correctness

Week 6 (2022-10-23)

The essence of graph databases

building a graph database from the ground up, writing an original, minimal system in Rust

Week 7 (2022-10-30)

Storage-level systems engineering

diving into embedded database design: lessons about reliability, hardware, & performance

Week 8 (2022-11-13)

Web compiler infrastructure

advances in the most popular compiler and transpiler infrastructure in the world

Week 9 (2022-11-27)

Practical authenticated encryption

what is AEAD? dive into ChaCha20-Poly1305, and make your own end-to-end encrypted chat

Week ?? (postponed)

Nix: Reproducible builds

a unique system for isolated, declarative, and reproducible package environments

Who’s organizing this?