Favorite CS class I have taken at UVA. It is difficult, you might bang your keyboard trying to debug Raft but it was good. For reference check the 6.5840: Distributed Systems class by MIT. The assignments basically follow that up to end of 2c. Chang is a wonderful professor and incredibly helpful.

#tCFS24

This is the best CS elective I've taken at UVA! Professor Lou has designed the course and his lectures very well. I felt like I learned so much each lecture but also was able to follow right along. The midterm exam was very fair for the content we covered. There were four homework assignments -- one was a MapReduce implementation and the other three were Raft implementations. They're written in Go (I used Go at my internship so this was straight forward but I don't think it's a hard language to pick up even if you haven't used it before). The homeworks were really good programming assignments -- they were very open ended in terms of your implementation but did not feel unachievable. You definitely need to budget plenty of time for them because it's a lot of bug hunting but he gives at least three weeks for each. Professor Lou is still a new professor and so there were some things that needed improvement (there were some times that people seemed scared to speak up in class) but I'm sure he will continue to improve in that area. Highly recommend this course! #tCFS24