Sourcegraph is amazing. It's made my life so much easier by pointing me towards concrete implementations and use cases of libraries/projects that I'm learning. It's one of those tools that I had no idea I needed until I started using it, at which point it became indispensable.
I've mentioned this in a couple comments below, but I think that this class teaches you a lot more than that. I took the class when it was offered at Stanford and one of the most valuable things I took out of the class was how to build APIs for different business functions. Being able to automate huge parts of your business, regardless of what industry you're in, is a huge advantage. Think about an energy company building APIs to monitor consumption and efficiency at client sites and adjusting their work accordingly -- that's huge. This class does a lot more than teach you how to build webapps; it teaches you to think in an automation mindset and happens to teach you a lot of useful skills along the way.
Sure, but my main point was about the types of things taught in the class: mostly technical things.
Most developers are already good at these things (or can learn them fairly quickly). The hard part of building a startup, at least for developers, is actually learning how to run a business and grow it. How to acquire users/customers, how to market, how to take care of all the "nasty but necessary" paperwork.
The class is the sequel to the class by Peter Thiel that covered those things. Unfortunately that class isn't available online, to my knowledge - but the Stanford students who first took that and then this would be learning both.
As somebody who is already reasonably good at the soft skills, I have really been looking forward to this class as a primer and entry point (though clearly not a silver bullet) to learn the technical skills.
I actually disagree a bit here -- Balaji and Vijay (the instructors) have both built incredibly successful companies based on many of the principles that they teach in the course. Sure, the online course won't teach you to do genomics or protein folding or build solar panels, but what it will do is allow you to create many of the components that support businesses like those. Thinking in a broader sense about what APIs for various business functions can do and how they can help you can be a tremendous help and this class can teach you how to build those APIs.
I also took the class in the winter at Stanford and had an awesome experience. We focused on the things that mattered and a bunch of really cool startups came out of the class. I can also imagine that it'll be excellent online -- Balaji put together great writeups of the content we covered that I'm still referencing now and I believe the (amazing) guest lecturers were filmed.
