Vemana's Space.

Welcome to Vemana’s Space. I am Subrahmanyam, a Staff Software Engineer at Google. This is where I write about anything that catches my fancy. Usual suspects are Software Engineering, Math, Life & Laughter. I am particularly interested in reducing human intensity of software development by 100x.

All opinions are my own and offered without guarantee.

What’s Vemana?

Vemana is a Telugu poet particularly known for short, rythmic, life-lesson poems. His most famous work is Vemana Sathakam comprising 100 poems each of which is 3 short lines long completed by a final 4th signature line.

Example

Alpudepudu palku aadambaramugaanu         A smaller person speaks pompously
Sajjanundu palku challagaanu              An accomplished person speaks measuredly
Kanchu mroginatlu kanakambu mrogunaa      Brass is louder than Gold
Viswadaabhiraama vinura vema              Signature line

Why Vemana?

Briefly,

• Vemana’s poems manage to convey exceptional life-lessons in 3 eminently recallable lines of about 5 words each
• Many complex topics appear to have a compressed, mostly correct & recallable explanation using a branching factor of 3, albeit building upon other constructs. For example,
  • Newton’s laws are recallable because they are small (3) in number and build upon constructs like Calculus
  • Distributed Consensus problem only has 3 constraints (Termination, Agreement & Validity)
• 3 appears to be a sweet spot for humans (or just me?)
  • Less than 3 appears insufficient while more than 3 seems difficult to remember/reason even if some theories like Group Theory require more axioms
  • My technical summaries - both for myself & others - usually keep to a branching factor of 3
  • Even Why Vemana? requires only a branching factor of 3

Contact

Whether you’d like to just say hello or wish to say something deeper or have an interesting proposition, I’d love to hear from you via email (link below) or other channels.