(Fall 2017)
Pros
I really love the homework assignments for this course (which are pulled from MIT's Distributed Systems class); I find them incredibly relevant and interesting programming challenges for distributed systems. I also love that the instructions and test cases are all given ahead of time. It gives me a lot of time as a student to start early and make sure I write my program correctly to earn full points.
The TA is good, but I wish he would hold more than once regular office hours per week. One hour of office hours each week is not nearly enough for a class of this level that has ~80 students.
Cons
I find Prof. Geambasu's classroom delivery to be disorganized and hard to follow along with. I am not a fan of how she writes the lecture notes word-for-word on the blackboard, and she sometimes trails off while explaining something. There were several instances (e.g. first lecture of Paxos) when I went to the TA after class to clarify a concept, and was told by the TA that the professor made several mistakes when explaining the concept in class.
The lecture notes are decent, but could be formatted better.