About Me (Stephen Ball)

Hello

Hi. I'm Stephen Ball

I've had some kind of online presence on the Internet for over 25 years now.

This Svelte/SvelteKit site is my latest foray into having some kind of space on the web to call mine.

Talks

Deliberate Git — Steel City Ruby, 2013

Power Up Your Prompt! — Abstractions, 2016

Unrecorded

Follow Your Feedback — Abstractions II, 2019

Unrecorded

What do programming tests, command line tools, and technical interviews all have in common? They're all feedback systems! We'll dive through these three systems and explore how they are each more than their direct results. What tests say about the system itself, where command line tools fit in their larger ecosystem, and how to categorize and approach technical interviews.

Livebook Smart Cells are Amazing — ElixirConf, 2022

Posts on company blogs

You're Smart Enough for Elixir — Spreedly, 2017

Elixir seemed like a scary, fascinating, almost unbelievable world. Serving web requests by creating a new server for each individual request? Madness! No data mutation? Isn’t that what data, you know, does? Processes that supervise other processes? How does that even work?

From Riak to Kafka: Part I — Spreedly, 2017

I describe the implementation details of how Spreedly reliably and efficiently produces data from Riak to Kafka. I walk through the technical challenges and approaches I considered before landing on writing a postcommit hook in Riak paired with an Elixir application to produce data to Kafka with high availability and fault tolerance.

Other Sites

I have a fun time comparision site: Further From and a couple of movie terminals in JavaScript at Movie Terminals