I took CS193P when it was first offered in 2007; one of my favorite classes at Stanford because it was so hands-on. At the time few people had iPhones, so everyone in the class got a free iPod Touch for development. My final project was a photo sharing app with a Polaroid shake to reveal mechanic… lightly influenced Instagram which Kevin and I built a few years later!
I regret that we put my subdivision assignment as the last one, and we allowed students to skip one assignment. Most students skipped it, but those that did the work thought it was super cool to have their own subdivision tool for making smooth meshes.
If you were a student in 2025, is CS193P (looks swiftUI rendering heavy) still the hands-on foundation for the next-big-tinkerer or would it look more like building around affordances of AI? (or something else).
Yeah. Instagram was lovely. It might be disheartening to see what it became, what it does to people's minds for a profit, the costs for society as a whole.
I wasted a few minutes earlier today trying to find the original website for the Cocoa class that Tristan helped set up a few years before this one got started.
