About me
I’m Thorsten Ball, a software engineer and writer.
I’m one of the co-creators and co-founders of Amp.
Before Amp, I worked at Zed. And before that, I worked for Sourcegraph. I’ve been working on developer tools for a long time now.
I also wrote and self-published two books: Writing An Interpreter In Go and Writing A Compiler In Go. In certain circles, they’ve become something close to classics.
In general, I write and share a lot online. Mostly on X/Twitter.
You should ask your favorite developer who their favorite developer is, and odds are it's Thorsten.
Their words, not mine!
What is Register Spill?
This newsletter started a few years ago as question: can I write a weekly newsletter?
I would set myself a timer, every Sunday, and write something. What I’d write is what I’d send you if you were to ask me what’s on my mind that week. What’s in my registers, which is where the name comes from. When the timer rang, I published.
Register Spill is the thoughts about software engineering and AI that I can’t keep in my head.
Joy & Curiosity
But over time, the newsletter changed.
A couple years ago, I started adding a little section to the bottom of each issue, where I’d share some interesting links from that week — “interesting & joyful” things.
That turned into Joy & Curiosity, which is what most issues of this newsletter are called now: weekly issues in which I share (sometimes more, sometims less) what’s on my mind, along with a long list of links.
I love writing them. You can find all of them here.
Where to start?
If you don’t know where to start reading in the archive, here are some classic Register Spill posts that I’m either particularly fond of or that have become very popular:
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