Thorsten Ball

Hi there! My name is Thorsten Ball. I'm a software engineer and writer, living in Aschaffenburg, Germany, a small city near Frankfurt am Main.

I work as a software engineer at Sourcegraph and self-published two books.

I like to develop, optimize and take care of sophisticated systems. Or put another way: I like to program where the rubber hits the road -- wherever that may be.

In the early morning hours I love to deep dive into topics that interest me: programming languages, interpreters, compilers, web servers, systems programming, Unix, databases.

I'm a big fan of digging deep and peeling away at abstraction layers to get a better sense of what I'm working with and more leverage higher up. In short: I love learning new things.

Books

Writing An Interpreter In Go

Self-published in November 2016

In the book we build a programming language from scratch. We start with 0 lines of code and end up with a fully working interpreter for the Monkey programming language. We build the lexer, the parser, the AST, the object system, and the evaluator — written with tests first and without 3rd-party libraries. This book is not about theory, its focus is runnable, working code.

Find out more and buy it at interpreterbook.com

Writing A Compiler In Go — Available now!

Self-published in July 2018

This is the sequel to Writing An Interpreter In Go and contains the next step in the evolution of the Monkey programming language: we're switching out the tree-walking evaluator for a bytecode compiler and virtual machine. It starts where the first book ends, uses the same codebase and follows the same approach: working code front and center, written from the ground up, tested and runnable.

Find out more and buy it at compilerbook.com

Posts

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• 04 Feb 2020 How much do we bend to the will of our tools?
• 09 Apr 2019 Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
• 04 Sep 2018 The Tools I Use To Write Books
• 14 Aug 2018 The Paperback Edition of Writing A Compiler In Go
• 28 Jun 2017 The Lost Chapter: A Macro System For Monkey
• 22 Feb 2017 Writing An Interpreter In Go: The Paperback Edition
• 08 Feb 2017 Higher Value Tools
• 16 Jan 2017 What I didn't do to write a book
• 04 Jan 2017 A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go
• 30 Nov 2016 Why I Wrote a Book About Interpreters
• 16 Nov 2016 Putting Eval In Go
• 22 Oct 2015 Write Stupid Code
• 20 Nov 2014 Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks
• 13 Oct 2014 Why threads can't fork
• 13 Jun 2014 Where did fork go?
• 12 Mar 2014 Watching and Understanding the Ruby 2.1 Garbage Collector at Work
• 11 Aug 2013 Named Pipes
• 07 Apr 2013 Watchgopher
• 15 Jan 2013 Discipline
• 24 Oct 2012 Command Line Ride
• 02 Sep 2012 Software Cover Versions And Programming Licks
• 09 Jul 2012 Vim Learning Resources
• 20 Jun 2012 How I used 98840 commands less and saved 4 seconds
• 08 Jun 2012 Ordered Search Autocompletion With Redis

Podcasts

• 01 Sep 2019CoRecursive Podcast - Learning about Compilers and Bytecode from Thorsten Ball
• 07 May 2019Software Engineering Radio - 365: Thorsten Ball on Building an Interpreter
• 04 Feb 2019CodeNewbie Podcast - What's a Compiler? with Thorsten Ball
• 13 Sep 2018Developer On Fire - Thorsten Ball - Interpreters, Compilers, and Writing
• 30 Jun 2017The Hanselminutes Podcast - YOU should write an interpreter with Thorsten Ball
• 23 Dec 2016Go Time #28 - Creating a Programming Language with Thorsten Ball

Talks

• 13 Nov 2018 Gophers Darmstadt JIT me, baby, just in time
• 14 Sep 2017 Elixir |> RheinMain Elixir - Macros On Erlang (Slides)
• 06 Apr 2017 Frankfurt Gophers Meetup A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go (Slides)
• 04 Nov 2015 Hochschule Trier Software Engineering at Flinc
• 13 Mar 2015 wroc_love.rb in Wroclaw, Poland Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)
• 11 Feb 2015 flinc Lunch-Talk in Darmstadt, Germany Introduction to Go (Slides)
• 02 Oct 2014 ArrrrCamp in Ghent, Belgium Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)

Contact