Hi there! My name is Thorsten Ball. I'm a software developer living in Aschaffenburg, Germany, a small city near Frankfurt am Main.
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.
At daytime, as a software developer at ioki, I work with a web stack: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML and also CSS (please don't ask me about floats). I also use Go and even shipped performance-increasing C code to production. If you ask me how much I like PostgreSQL and SQL, I'll talk your ears off.
But before I leave for work, in the early morning hours, I love to deep dive into other programming 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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- 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
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)
Podcasts
- 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 - Episode 373 | 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
Projects
Applikatoni - A deployment server for small teams with multiple applications, written in Go, developed at flinc.
Fzz - Small command line tool that makes your command line interactive. Also see vim-fzz.
Watchgopher - A lightweight, scriptable and UNIX-y filewatcher.
dotfiles - My dotfiles. git, zsh, tmux, etc.
vimconfig - Everything that goes on in my ~/.vim folder.
Recreational Programming
Not finished, not stable, not ready for production, but fun!
Helles - A multi-process webserver written entirely in C.
Sceem - A small Lisp/Scheme interpreter written in Ruby.
Contact
Never hesitate to send me an email at me@thorstenball.com. I love getting email from you.
You can also find me on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, XING and Facebook.
I also maintain a mailing list, on which I sent out occasional updates about my book or this blog. I won't spam you and you can unsubscribe at any time.