lecture Archive

Bachelor students of computer science at Zurich University of Applied Sciences focus a lot on software development. Software is never developed in the blue; rather, software needs a concrete environment to function and to deliver value. In ‘Programming’ (1st/2nd semester) and ‘Software Development’ (3rd/4th semester), you learn some basic skills. In ‘Systems-oriented Programming’ (2nd semester), you apply these skills to predefined systems with some constraints. In ‘Web Development’ (3rd semester), you apply these skills to another environment in which there is a lot of pace through new technologies. In ‘Game Development’ (5th semester), you develop for specific interactive scenarios, and in ‘Mobile Applications’ (5th semester, you develop user-facing apps for common mobile platforms.

One of the most fascinating and economically important areas is the development of applications which run in the cloud. You may access them with web or mobile devices, but you still cannot see them! Still, they are very powerful, scalable to millions of users, and interconnected across cloud providers and with various backend systems such as databases, message queues and key-value stores. This is why we offer SCAD, a new elective module on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development.

On July 31 and August 1/2, purposefully disregarding the Swiss national holiday, the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences was represented at the premises of the Indian Institute of Technology, the former Indian School of Mines, in Dhanbad, the most populous city in the northeastern Indian state Jharkhand. Although the area is traditionally known for its coal and minerals industry, IIT (ISM) Dhanbad is also offering teaching, research and academic services including conference organisation in computer science fields. This matching profile with overlapping areas has triggered our interest, and thus Josef Spillner made the trip to offer guest lectures, tutorials and faculty-level discussions about future exchanges. This article reports on the days spent in Dhanbad.