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

You can subscribe to post updates via the Atom feed.

• 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