About · operator notes
Hi, I’m Ram.
Yes, it’s hidden in the name: param. A parameter is the one value you change to see how a system behaves, and that’s the whole idea behind this lab.
I’m an engineer. ParamLab is my workbench, kept in public: I pick a system, find the value that matters, push it until something breaks, and publish the code, the write-up and the video.
Why I’m doing this
- R01
Breaking things is how I learn
I remember the bugs I caused far better than the ones I read about. So everything here is built for you to cause the bug yourself.
- R02
The best lessons are stuck in PDFs
Inquiry reports are brutally honest engineering writing, and almost nobody reads them. A slider you can drag gets the lesson across in ten seconds.
- R03
I wanted explanations with the code left in
Textbooks give you the formula. I want to change gravity in the source and watch the curve move. Students deserve that too.
- R04
One person can build a lot more now
I build with AI as a pair programmer. I’ll show how that really goes, wrong turns included.
- R05
Public keeps me honest
Published code can be checked and published claims can be corrected. A public log means I ship, cite, and own my mistakes.
What you’ll find here
Post-Mortem Lab: history’s most expensive engineering failures, from Ariane 5 to CrowdStrike, rebuilt as small simulations. You run them, trigger the bug, apply the fix, and keep one lesson.
Show Me Why: ideas from school science and maths, explained with interactive visuals and the code behind them. Change a line and see what changes. It’s made for students, and for anyone who never got the “why” the first time.
How I work
- Sources first
- Every claim about a real incident traces to the official investigation or a primary source.
- Simplifications labelled
- Simulations simplify. When they do, the post says where and why.
- Proof, not prose
- Every bug ships with a test that fails, and every fix with a test that passes.
- Open by default
- All code is MIT-licensed. Every episode is a git tag you can check out.
- Respect
- Some of these failures cost lives. We study them to learn, never to mock the people involved.
Who it’s for
- Developers who want to recognise failure patterns before they ship them.
- Students who learn better by poking at something than by memorising it.
- Teachers looking for demos they can put on a projector and change live.
- Anyone curious about how things work, and how they stop working.
Say hello
Spotted a mistake, or have an incident or topic you want rebuilt? Open an issue or a discussion on GitHub. Corrections get credited. You can also follow along via RSS.