From thorstenball.com
1 11
Last week, at a conference, I had a random hallway conversation with another engineer. About AI.
on Wed, 7PM
From thorstenball.com
0 0
This snippet of Rust code has been stuck in my head for weeks now.
on Oct 23
From thorstenball.com
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From aliases, to commits, to commit messages, to reviews, to workflows.
on Oct 18
From thorstenball.com
Database Indexes & Phone Books
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One of the best analogies I’ve ever been taught
on Sep 16
From thorstenball.com
0 0
Friday evening I had dinner with Felix. Among other things, we talked about good code. Good code, we both agreed, is simple. It's code boiled down to its essence.
on Aug 25
From thorstenball.com
0 0
It’s been a few weeks since I listened to this German podcast episode about the downfall of a company called Schlecker and I keep thinking about an anecdote one of the hosts shared.
on Aug 10
From thorstenball.com
Things you can do with codebases
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It's easy to forget that we're surrounded by millions and millions of lines of code that we can access and build and run and modify and tweak — whenever and however we want.
on Aug 4
From thorstenball.com
Did you know about Instruments?
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For the longest time, I thought Instruments on macOS wasn’t for me. Whenever I saw its icon show up in the /Applications folder or pop up in a launcher, I assumed it’s part of Xcode and Xcode is an IDE for Objective-C and Swift programmers and that’s not what I do and that’s why Instruments isn’t for me.
on Jul 20
From thorstenball.com
0 0
It was eight years ago that I lived through some of the worst weeks of my life as a professional software engineer. I was working for a small startup that was about to be acquired. Or about to go bankrupt. There was no other possible outcome anymore. Acquired or bankrupt, it was one of these two...
on Jul 6
From thorstenball.com
0 0
This week I found myself digging through the code of c4, an implementation of C “in four functions”, by Robert Swierczek. I remember coming across c4 when it was released ten years ago. It got me excited: hey, C in four functions, that means it’s easy to understand right?
on May 10
From thorstenball.com
0 0
Last week I got a new monitor, after my old one has shown worse and worse signs of what looked like burn-ins. The new monitor allowed me to get rid of two (!) cables in my setup, which pleased me quite a bit. And since there are people reading this whose eyebrows went up at the “two cables”, I...
on Apr 28
From thorstenball.com
0 0
Whenever I talk with programmer friends about Apple I try to sneak the following story in. Usually I start with “did you know that Apple…?” and end by leaning back in the chair, my index finger pointing at the table, and me saying “… now that’s engineering.”
on Apr 15
From thorstenball.com
0 0
After around 20 years of using Vim, in December last year I switched to Zed as my main editor. Since some friends have asked me about the switch — “Now that you work at Zed, are you using Zed instead of Vim?” — I thought I’d write about it. You now know that I did switch, yes, so what’s left to...
on Apr 14
From thorstenball.com
0 0
Here’s what I consider to be the basics. I call them that not because they’re easy, but because they’re fundamental. The foundation on which your advanced skills and expertise rest. Multipliers and nullifiers, makers and breakers of everything you do.
on Mar 27
From thorstenball.com
The Lightness of Unscheduled Calls
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In my first week at Zed it took until the third day for someone to hop on a video call with me. The second video call happened in the week after that. Since then — I’ve just completed four weeks — I’ve only had two other video calls, both of which were
on Feb 17
From thorstenball.com
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When we were 16 years old my friend and I spray-painted our keyboards in camouflage colors. We had just seen Hackers, wanted to copy what we saw, and – yes, 16 years old – didn’t think much further than (1) get spray paint (2) spray-paint the keyboard. Only after the paint dried did we realise...
on Feb 4
From thorstenball.com
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Thorsten Ball: Now you’re thinking: does it matter? 100ms? 200ms? Come on, dude. And I’m telling you: yes it matters. Of course it matters. Those who don’t honor the milliseconds will end up with seconds. 100%, it absolutely matters. Who wants to walk around with clown shoes
on Jan 25
From thorstenball.com
Which command did you run 1731 days ago?
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Let's talk about shell history.
on Jan 23
From thorstenball.com
New year, new job, new machine
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Setting up a new MacBook Pro M3 Max
on Jan 7
From thorstenball.com
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Have you noticed that the newest versions of Chrome on macOS show how much memory a tab is using? I don’t mean something in the developer tools, or an internal process manager. No, you now only have to hover your cursor over a tab and Chrome tells you: this one uses 60MB, that one 200MB, the one...
on Dec 22
From thorstenball.com
0 0
This is my last week at Sourcegraph. Today’s my last day. At 6pm my computer will be wiped cleaned and 4.5 years come to end. 4.5 years so dense that at other companies the timer would probably show 8, or 10 years. Why am I leaving? Over the past few months I realised that there’s still many,...
on Dec 15
From thorstenball.com
0 0
I told you before that I could write more about The Bear’s S2E7. Here we are. I came across this clip from that episode this week and decided now’s the time. The scene is a dialogue between Ritchie, who works in a high-class restaurant for the first time, and Garrett, who’s worked there for a...
on Dec 4
From thorstenball.com
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Last weekend I watched this video of Andreas Kling prototyping a JIT compiler for his Ladybird browser: It’s a very interesting video, for two reasons. One: if you’re interested in how bytecode VMs and JIT compilers work, it’s all in there, explained step by step. A goldmine, really. If I had...
on Nov 25
From thorstenball.com
0 0
Here’s a very interesting bit of Zig that I came across again this week: @fieldParentPtr. It’s a prism through which you can see a lot of Zig’s character. That’s not what the official docs say, of course. They say that @fieldParentPtr: Given a pointer to a field, returns the base pointer of a struct.
on Nov 3, 2023
From thorstenball.com
Notes From the Field: Learning Zig
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This was my week off and I wanted to learn some more Zig. What I did: dug into the Zig compiler, wrote toy programs to replicate parts of it, tried to understand the Zig way of doing things. I’ve also spent two days hacking a GTK feature into Ghostty
on Oct 20, 2023
From thorstenball.com
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Rules are an endless source of fascination and dread to me. How rules are created and why, how rules accumulate, how a set of rules shapes a system – it’s very, very interesting. Let me give you an example. A couple years ago my wife and I were chatting with our tax advisor and he went off on a...
on Oct 8, 2023
From thorstenball.com
0 1
Every time I’m in the gym I use the same app on my phone: KeyLifts. For 3 years now, four to five times a week, the same app. I love it. I pay for the yearly subscription and the app is a huge if not the only reason why I’ve been running the same workout program (5/3/1) for years now. Whenever...
on Oct 1, 2023