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Episode 373 | Thorsten Ball - Interpreters, Compilers, and Writing

Guest:
Thorsten Ball talks with Dave Rael about writing code and writing books, diving deep, failure, persistence, and languages

Thorsten Ball is a software developer and writer. He works at ioki, where he helps to build and scale the web application that powers the mobility platform. He wrote two books: "Writing An Interpreter in Go" and its sequel, "Writing A Compiler In Go". Both books are a result of his love for doing what he calls "recreational programming", where he digs deep into various topics, hoping to come out the other end with a better understanding of what it is that we do when we program. For the last few years, the two topics that kept his attention the most are systems programming and programming languages. He's also interested in the other side of doing professional software development: software engineering in a team, communicating through code, team and company culture and how to write good code together. This fascination with programming and what it means to develop software, turned into his two books and various blog posts, podcast appearances and talks.

Thorsten's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
  1. Learn to write well because communication is important
  2. Know one level of abstraction beneath you
  3. Write code to be changed and/or deleted

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