Ben Balter
I'm Ben Balter — I write here about engineering leadership, open source, and showing your work.
ben.balter.comROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS
It's pronounced JIF. The Open and Async audiobook is out.
The Open and Async audiobook is out. It's read by a synthetic narrator who says 'jif,' correctly. For the hard-G crowd who insist that's heresy, I re-recorded an entire chapter in their (wrong) pronunciation and posted it free. One chapter the wrong way, or eleven and a half hours the right way.
LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In thirteen years at GitHub I was part of 25 reorgs—almost one every six months. Reorgs are a constant in tech, not a crisis. Here's how to navigate them.
EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE
Open and Async: the remote-work playbook is out
Open and Async is the practical playbook for making remote and distributed work actually work—two habits, working in the open and communicating asynchronously, drawn from a decade of remote-first lessons at GitHub.
EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE
Work loudly
In an office, some of your visibility is free. Go remote and it drops to zero. Working loudly makes your impact visible as you do it—not after the fact in a status update nobody reads.
AI ETHICS AND GOVERNANCE
AI-first program management
AI-augmented program management is the natural evolution of async-first and engineering-inspired workflows — amplifying human judgment, not replacing it.