Petra Liang

I work on the network stack at Fastly and contribute to the IETF working groups on QUIC and HTTP/3. I'm joining Lattice as visiting faculty for Cohort XIII to lead the brand-new Networks & Wire Formats course.

I read RFCs for fun. This is, I am told, an acquired taste. I'm here to teach it.

Networks & Wire Formats is the course I would have wanted ten years ago — the one that takes you from sockets to streaming, builds an HTTP/2 server from the layer below, and ends with the students designing a small wire format they'd actually be willing to ship. The course is new for Cohort XIII; I co-wrote the curriculum with Mira and Tomás over a long autumn.

What I want students to leave with is, more than anything, fluency in reading specifications. The IETF body of work is one of the great underappreciated literatures of computing — most engineers will use TLS, HTTP, or QUIC every day for their entire careers and never read a word of the documents that define them. That's a reading-list problem.

I'll be in Berlin during the residence weeks (weeks 3, 6, and 9 of the cohort). The rest of the time I'm reachable on the alumni Slack and via Tuesday office hours.