EC103: Systems, State & the Architecture of Memory

How Biological Memory Inspired Software Design

Understand state once and debugging becomes storytelling instead of pain

📋 Overview

Computers borrowed heavily from humans: working memory vs RAM, long-term memory vs disk, stacks vs recall. This course connects the dots.

What You'll Learn:

• Mutable vs immutable thinking
• Local, global, and shared state
• Call stacks, closures, scopes
• Declarative vs imperative paradigms
• Event-driven and reactive models

🎯 Key Outcomes

• Trace state through any codebase
• Reason about side-effects and purity
• Design state flows for UI, APIs, agents
• Explain memory issues using human language

🗺️ Course Structure

1. Memory Mirrors – Biology → Von Neumann architecture
2. Execution Contexts – Stack frames, scope chains
3. State Machines – Modeling processes formally
4. Immutability – When to freeze, when to mutate
5. State at Scale – Shared stores, caches, distributed state

🔗 Connections

• Builds on EC102
• Leads to EC201 & EC301

🚀 Getting Started

Difficulty: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | Time: ~12 hours | Prereq: EC102