# Thorsten Ball

> Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.

- **Role:** Software Engineer at Sourcegraph (Amp)
- **Organizations:** Sourcegraph, Zed (former), Flinc (former)
- **Nationality:** German
- **Education:** Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin)
- **Known for:** Self-published two bestselling programming books: 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', 46,000+ Twitter/X followers as a technical voice in the Go and systems programming community, Author of 'Register Spill', a well-regarded weekly newsletter on software engineering

## Career timeline

- **2012** — Started technical blogging at thorstenball.com
- **~2014-2015** — Software engineer at Flinc, a ride-sharing startup in Darmstadt, Germany
- **2016** — Self-published 'Writing an Interpreter in Go'
- **2018** — Self-published 'Writing a Compiler in Go'
- **~2018-2023** — Software engineer at Sourcegraph for approximately 5 years, working on Batch Changes team
- **2023-04** — Launched 'Register Spill' weekly newsletter
- **2023-12** — Left Sourcegraph for Zed
- **2024-01** — Joined Zed as software engineer, worked on Predictive Edits, inline completions, Vim mode
- **2025-01** — Rejoined Sourcegraph to work on Amp (AI coding agent)

## Achievements

- Self-published two bestselling programming books: 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go'
- 46,000+ Twitter/X followers as a technical voice in the Go and systems programming community
- Author of 'Register Spill', a well-regarded weekly newsletter on software engineering
- Contributed ~500 pull requests during tenure at Zed editor
- Key contributor to Sourcegraph Batch Changes, a significant revenue-generating product
- Active speaker at developer conferences including ArrrrCamp Belgium and Elixir RheinMain
- Over 20 years of professional software engineering experience

## Latest updates

- **2026-01** — Appeared on Fraunhofer IEM Inside AI podcast #28
- **2025-09** — Featured on Latent Space podcast: 'Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes'
- **2024-11** — Gave talk 'Writing Tucan' at Homebrew Systems Club Munich

## Links

- Website: https://thorstenball.com
- LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/thorsten-ball-3142b652
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/thorstenball
- GitHub: https://github.com/mrnugget

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/thorsten-ball
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-20