About me: professional full stack developer with 7 YOE., married with a young child. Bachelor's was not in CS. Took DC as my 8th course. Prior relevant courses included GIOS, AOS, and SDCC.

Time Commitment: The course starts off fairly light. The first 2 projects can be knocked out in a weekend. You can easily get by with <10 hours per week until you get to project 3. Around project 4, I was averaging 20-25 hours a week and for project 5 it was closer to 30-35. This was to get all tests to pass for every project. Each project has a few tests that are very difficult to pass. This doesn't mean the tests are unfair. Distributed systems are hard.

I'm not going to go through the specifics of each project there are plenty of reviews that cover this topic well.

Spring 2021 is an outlier The class was radically changed based on the feedback from this first class. The professor and teaching staff are fairly open about how brutal that semester was. There is now more time to work on projects 4 & 5.

Search Tests are your friend This was one the best features of DSLabs. Search tests provide valuable information about what's incorrect about your implementation.

Start projects early Despite the reputation, many students wait too long to start the projects. Those that started late almost always ended up with the low scores.

Don't take this as your first class An alarming number of students were taking this or their first class or had no prior "hard" classes. I recommend taking at least GIOS or AOS prior to taking this class. It doesn't hurt to be over prepared like I was.

TA's were helpful, but don't expect hand holding I found the TAs to be responsive. Slack was fairly active with great discussion, but most students didn't really take advantage of this. There is light "hand holding" in this class. The TA's may suggest a high level strategy, but won't go beyond that.