CS 4740

This is probably the most industry-focused class at the University, Humphrey teaches you the industry terms and he keeps you up with the latest news about the major cloud computing companies. It's not a very programming-heavy course, but it absolutely teaches you things that will be in job interviews.

When you see the course name, "Cloud Computing," you're thinking, "woah, this sounds pretty cool/interesting." Well, you're half right. Professor Humphrey is a dry humor kinda guy, almost intimidating and makes you feel dumb when you ask clarifying questions, but he's pretty cool--kinda like a dad. Anyway, the lectures are boring and I didn't even know what was going on most of the time, but I took notes anyway. Taking good notes will be your saving grace, because the slides are pretty useless. The programming assignments were REALLY cool though. Very realistic and utilized actual things we could use in real life like working with load balancers in AWS and and programming code for Amazon Alexa--pretty cool stuff. If it weren't for the homework assignments, I would probably not have enjoyed the class. As far as tests go, review your notes carefully and memorize everything. The tests are pretty wacky and ask a lot of high level things that may not have been directly said in class, so just be prepared for anything. Other than that, I don't think this class is too difficult, just make sure you get A's on all the programming assignments and you will be fine.

Pros:
-Marty has a pretty dry, sarcastic sense of humor.
-Material covers a lot of real-world stuff that you'll actually use in your job.
-Industry focused, and you learn a lot more about the CS/programming/engineering industry as a result of learning about new tech and news items.
-Amazon Web Services is the most used cloud service in the industry, and that's what's used in the class.
Cons:
-A lot of material to be covered. It's fairly non-traditional for a CS class in that there's a lot more discussion, nuance, and some things about the industry that you'll just have to straight up memorize.
-Marty's sense of humor can rub some people the wrong way, but most people liked him in our class.

The grades/assignments breakdown:

Our semester had 7 programming assignments. They all start off with some level of tutorial stuff and getting your feet wet so to speak. Can be a bit hard to do at the last moment, but overall fairly reasonable, as you get like 9 or 10 days for each assignment. These accounted for 50% of the grade.

Go to class and get participation points. 10%.

1 midterm, 1 final, lots of material from the slides.

Overall, a worthwhile and decently fun class to take. I didn't always manage my time well or study the material super super hard, but it was still interesting, and really useful (talked about load balancers and AWS in an interview and got the job, so credit to Marty)

Cloud with Humphrey was definitely one of the most practical courses I've taken at UVA. Humphrey's very good about teaching the newest, most useful cloud technologies (he regularly updates assignments to reflect important topics that are useful for current industry). I've applied what I learned in this class for hackathons and even impressed my managers at AWS with my background knowledge from this course. Humphrey asks students thought-provoking questions in class and has a somewhat dry sense of humor (which I enjoy) as other reviews have pointed out. The course load is largely coding assignments, but they're pretty interesting and all take under 10 hours to complete. Do be careful about details on the tests though. Overall, 10/10 would recommend.

Brexit!

For a guy who speaks like 3 words a minute and mostly just shows us AWS ads in class, Humphrey sure is condescending. His answers to the valid questions students ask are pedantic, unhelpful, and sometimes actively antagonizing. For instance, someone pointed out a disparity between code he wrote and the assignment write-up and he replied "I don't understand -- I don't see a question here" but then proceeded to correct the write-up. Meanwhile, the assignments' code and structures are poorly-written: the first assignment was basically a step-by-step set of instructions with absolutely no explanation as to what we were actually doing, and the second assignment has a blatant race condition, convoluted I/O piping, and numerous other bugs. Skip this class and just follow some AWS tutorial online.

As someone else said, Marty is needlessly snarky and condescending.

CASE 1) Was doing a data-cleaning part of an assignment and asked on Piazza:
Subject: "What to do with empty cells"
Body: "If the arrival time is empty, should we default to 0.0 for instance?"
His response: "I don’t really understand this question – if you were doing data analysis, and you were averaging something, and there was no entry for something, would you insert “0”? In most cases, it seems like this would improperly skew the analysis. yes?"
His favorite line, "I don't really understand this question," is totally unnecessary. And he could answer in a nicer tone.

CASE 2) Just finished programming assignment 5 and asked on Piazza what to shut off in AWS:
Subject: "PA4 - What to turn off"
Body: "What else do we need to turn off in AWS aside from the sagemaker?"
Instead of replying, "I think you meant PA5, but just follow step 10 of the assignment," he acts dumb and responds, "PA4? Sagemaker?"
Bro, you know I'm talking about PA5. Just. Answer. The. Damn. Question.

CASE 3) I went to office hours, and during the meeting, he repeatedly asked me, "so what's your question?" while I was explaining my problem. He also sighed audibly multiple times and once loudly proclaimed, "NO NO NO NO NO!" Seriously? I've never dealt with a single professor before Marty who didn't show their students a minimal level of civility.

CONT. It's not even like his lectures and assignments are good enough to counterbalance his personality. His lectures are dry and incredibly boring. Someone else said, "For a guy who speaks like 3 words a minute and mostly just shows us AWS ads in class" and I died laughing!! Tis true. His slides are bare and useless. It's also very confusing half the time because he doesn't explain it well starting from the start.

His assignments are either just step-by-step instructions with no explanation, or the assignments have no guidance and have just one instruction telling you what to build. Either way, you learn little, and I'm probably getting an A. The only thing I'm taking away from this class in practical terms is how to create an EC2 instance and SCP into it.

TL;DR: stay away from this professor. He sucks. Most people recommending him obviously haven't taken it with him. If you have the chance to take this class with another professor who likely gives the same assignments but lectures better and has a better attitude, TAKE IT.

P.S. If you do decide to this his class, some advice: As someone else said, "taking good notes will be your saving grace, because the slides are [very] useless." That's how I got an A on the exams. Most of the MC questions were particular things he talked about in class, so you can't rely on quizlets for those. Programming assignments are fairly easy to get 100s on though and not too much effort or too time-consuming, so don't stress out about that. Just don't start them last minute. If you do well on the PAs and exams, it's an easy A.

EDIT: idk why TCF doesn't display my linebreaks, so blame them for this post being one big, unreadable blob. Thank you for reading.

You're definitely getting a mixed bag with this class.

The lecture topics are super interesting, but the lectures themselves aren't that interesting or useful (although he definitely tries to make it interesting with his unique sense of humor). It's worth looking into the tech he talks about in class on your own time for a better picture. From what I saw from his interactions on Discord and Piazza, he definitely didn't seem super helpful during office hours or on Piazza either.

The programming assignments were pretty cool though. I was really into cloud computing and had prior AWS experience before I entered this class, so this was my favorite part of the class. However, almost every assignment was poorly worded, had typos, or contained outdated information (I get that AWS changes a lot, but come on man, check instead of using us to find the mistakes in the assignment for you), and the majority of the starter code he gave us was ripped from tutorials off of google, so this was incredibly frustrating.

Difficulty wise, not bad at all, easy A CS elective.

This is the most applicable class to industry I've taken here, and there's a lot of things you can build now that you're aware of all of these different technologies and concepts. I still feel like I learned a lot in this class despite all it's shortcomings. All in all, pretty good class that needs some tweaking.

I think some of the other reviews are overly harsh- I enjoyed the class overall, especially since it was my first introduction to cloud computing and a lot of the content.
Let's start with cons since that's what's been brought up.
CONS:
- Yes, he is needlessly combative and snarky. On Piazza, he'll often answer questions very indirectly or not at all. In lecture, he would occasionally call students out unnecessarily when they answered a question incorrectly. I didn't go to office hours but I heard they could be a challenge as well.
- Sometimes, the labs were confusing or had mistakes. I usually started them late because he cleared up those confusions in lecture. The exams were hard but being open-internet helped out a lot.
- Lecture speed. He speaks really slowly for an AM class. I watched the recordings at 1.5 speed.
PROS:
- The lectures were really useful to get you thinking about the "right tool for the job". We surveyed a bunch of different cloud computing tools and learned what dimensions to compare them on, like price, speed, etc. Although he was partial to AWS, we went over a lot of different platforms.
- Very up-to-date. Humphrey has industry experience and he updates the lectures to cover the latest technologies (e.g. GPUs and TPUs, blockchain, hybrid cloud). This is something you can't find often in academia.
- Lots of practical experience with AWS. I learned a lot about cloud computing not only in theory but also how to use AWS tools. It's a really relevant skill and pretty interesting too.
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