Openparens' Blog

Sharing wisdom gained from the school of knocks.


10 Minute Mental Model: Little's law, the giant governing Throughput & Latency

Where there's a queue, there's Little's law.

7 min read   ·   2025

Math Proofs: Insight vs Tricks. An example using Borel Cantelli Lemma.

Learning math should be about insights. But textbooks often fall short.

13 min read   ·   2024

10 Minute Mental Model: Hardware Memory Models

16 min read   ·   2023

The Web-scale Software Engineer Skillset

Many skillsets required. Some only learnable from practice.

38 min read   ·   2023

How to think about programs & programming? ABIYZ: inspired by age old tools like arithmetic.

A deep introspection of how we use arithmetic reveals a powerful pattern for programming.

23 min read   ·   2023

Can software testing be objective? Hello from Homomorphisms.

How many tests to write? What tests to write? Can there be objective answers? Surprisingly, the answer is yes for a certain class of programs.

27 min read   ·   2023