Ben Balter

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → The Open and Async audiobook is out.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → The build pipeline behind Open and Async is absurdly over-engineered: five formats out of one Markdown source, a real browser auditing every push, the works.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → My book has a linter that yells at me for hyphenating “open source.”1 It runs a battery of automated checks, rebuilds every format on each git push, and fails the build if I so much as imply I still wo…

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → A decision without a URL gets relitigated forever.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Most companies didn’t go remote.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → You did the work.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → In thirteen years at GitHub, I was part of 25 reorgs and reported to 13 different managers.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → When I first wrote about the nine things a program manager does, I didn’t dwell on what the job actually feels like first thing on a Monday.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Here’s the best career advice I ever received as a product manager: “product-manage your own career.”

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → It’s Thursday afternoon.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → You get the invite.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Context: I, human @benbalter, asked GitHub Copilot’s coding agent to “Add agentic workflows” to my personal blog repo.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Context: today marks thirteen years since I joined GitHub.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → You may be familiar with grammar checking tools like Grammarly,1 but if you’re privacy-conscious like me, you likely don’t want to send everything you type to a third-party service (or may be prohibited

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Every seasoned leader I’ve worked with has had to make an unpopular or controversial decision.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the book on open source.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Out now This post inspired a chapter in my book, Open & Async.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → The shift from waterfall to agile was predicated on the belief that what worked for the factory floor during the Industrial Revolution would not work for knowledge work in the Information Age, but asse…

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Remote work is not simply a matter of replicating the office environment online.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → We often think of pull requests purely as a code review mechanism, but they are also an organic and natural form of documentation.

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web → Time zones are one of the harder parts of software development, but it doesn’t have to be one of the harder (or exclusionary) parts of working as a distributed team.