Thanks to @overcommitted.dev for having me on to talk remote engineering culture, why a decision without a URL gets relitigated forever, why working loudly ≠ self-promotion, and why async is quietly an inclusion strategy. Full episode 🎧 overcommitted.dev/open-and-asy...

Open and Async Work | Remote Engineering Culture with Ben Balter - Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights - Episode 70

Learn how async-first communication transforms remote engineering culture and developer productivity. Ben Balter, open source governance expert, shares practical strategies for building transparent, d...

overcommitted.dev

Linux was remote-first three decades before "remote-first" was a LinkedIn headline. Open source is the biggest distributed-work experiment in history — it just never called itself that. Essay: allthingsopen.org/articles/open-source-solved-remote-work-distributed-collaboration

Open source already solved remote work. Everyone else is just catching up. | We Love Open Source • All Things Open

Open source has been running the world's largest distributed work experiment for decades. Here's what it got right about distributed collaboration — and how open source contributors can bring those sk...

allthingsopen.org

Most companies didn't go remote — they digitized the office. Same meetings, same interruptions, now on Zoom. Open and Async is out today: the open-source way of working — in the open, in writing, async by default — turned into a playbook for your team. open-and-async.com

Emoji, uh... finds a way. (Every time it breaks something, it's handing you an edge case you didn't know you had.)

User-supplied emoji always uncovers the edge cases.

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. ben.balter.com/2026/06/07/r...

Reorgs happen

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.

ben.balter.com

Since everyone seems to be publishing standard.site records for their website content, I have too... Inspired by @ben.balter.com 's post.

This site now has Atproto Records

danny.is

Ben Balter@ben.balter.com · 2mo ago

ben.balter.com now fully implements site.standard. Let's see where this thing goes.

🚀 NEW on We ❤️ Open Source 🚀 Great work can become invisible without a record of impact. Ben Balter (@ben.balter.com) explains how a simple brag doc helps fight recency bias, track wins, and strengthen promotion conversations over time. allthingsopen.org/articles/bra... #WeLoveOpenSource

Yesterday was my last day at GitHub. I’m going to take some time to ship a book sharing what I learned over the past 13 years (open-and-async.com).

Open & Async — A New Book by Ben Balter

The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams. Drawing on a decade at GitHub, this book shows you how to thrive—not just survive—in distributed work.

open-and-async.com

I made a thing. Please don't send meeting invites without an agenda. noagendanomeeting.net

No Agenda, No Meeting

A meeting without an agenda is like calling a function without documentation. Please don't send meeting invites without one.

noagendanomeeting.net

Today marks thirteen years since I joined GitHub. I’ve been writing a book—Open and Async—distilling everything I’ve learned about remote and distributed work into a playbook. To mark the “Hubberversary,” here is a WIP sneak preview of the book’s intro. ben.balter.com/2026/03/04/t...

I've worked remotely at GitHub for thirteen years: here's what actually works. | Ben Balter

When I joined GitHub in 2013, I found a company that had fundamentally rethought how work happens. Thirteen years later, the lessons from that experiment are more relevant than ever.

ben.balter.com

If you had access to virtually unlimited GitHub Copilot usage and could build anything, how would you use it to contribute to/better the open source community? What problems aren’t being solved because they’re too labor intensive? Example: rewrite Jekyll.rb as Jekyll.js to modernize it.

Can AI moderate open source communities to keep conversations productive? I created a quick GitHub Action that looks at issues/PRs/comments and can take moderation actions (warn, hide, lock, etc.) based on AI's evaluation of the content. Ideas/feedback welcome. github.com/benbalter/ai...

GitHub - benbalter/ai-community-moderator: An AI-powered GitHub Action that helps moderate community interactions by enforcing contributing guidelines and codes of conduct.

An AI-powered GitHub Action that helps moderate community interactions by enforcing contributing guidelines and codes of conduct. - benbalter/ai-community-moderator

github.com

Archived more than 4,000 inactive Slack channels today with a quick GitHub Action Copilot and I whipped up. I hope to open source “Slack Stale Archiver” after it’s been running for a bit. Encouraging people to post their favorite animated GIF to keep the channel active has been the best part so far.

Blog entry: Why I work in the open. I’ve long worked in the open, overwhelmingly for one reason: it increases enormously the surface area for success.

Why I work in the open.

I've long worked in the open, overwhelmingly for one reason: it increases enormously the surface area for success.

waldo.jaquith.org

Slack channel name squatting is the new domain squatting.

I see the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is making the rounds again in some circles. Thought it was timely to share this post again on my updated take: ben.balter.com/2016/01/15/h...

How to derail any meeting

How a WWII field manual can help modern knowledge workers identify those inadvertently sabotaging your organization today.

ben.balter.com

If you do a lot of writing and are looking for a grammar, style, and spell checker that doesn't send what you write to a third party service, I wrote up instructions for how to setup and use the open source LanguageTool locally on your machine. ben.balter.com/2025/01/30/h...

How to run LanguageTool on macOS

How to set up a free and open-source grammar, style, and spell checker that can be run locally on your machine without sending data to a third-party services like Grammarly, preserving the privacy of ...

ben.balter.com

I still have an irrational fear of @mentioning people in private Slack channels, ever since that one time that I @mentioned the CEO, accidentally clicked the wrong button, and ended up inviting him into the channel. At least he laughed at the creative channel name? 🤷‍♂️ Now I’m a backticks-only person.

Developers, do you want to verify yourself here but don't have a personal domain? You can use your GitHub account! 🦋🐱 I temporarily renamed myself to @nicolo-ribaudo.github.io :)

Reorgs are the organizational equivalent of turning it off and back on again.

Why everything should have a URL http://bit.ly/1MoMnQI

Why everything should have a URL

By naturally capturing and exposing process and sharing it as widely as is appropriate for the subject matter, URLs render organizational context time and location agnostic allowing knowledge to move more freely within an organization on an asynchronous, discoverable, and opt-in basis.

bit.ly

10+ years later and I still don’t have an answer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ben Balter@ben.balter.com · 12y ago

Is there a polite way to say "no, I don't want to jump on a quick call. Can't you just type up what you'd say and email it to me? async yo"?

Always be answering questions with URLs.

If you liked it then you should have put a URL on it.

Submitted a pull request to the closest thing GitHub has to an org chart. Merged or not, more companies should vet big changes in the open.

If you’re at GitHub Universe, come say hey! 👋

Remote since day one, GitHub learned a lot about how to communicate across time zones. We created an internal “how we communicate” doc, which we’re sharing with the world today. TL;DR: we use GitHub Actions and OpenAI to solve for information overload. PR’s welcome! github.blog/2023-10-04-h...

Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because async communication involves less frequent, but richer communication. There is less talking about the work and more doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. https://t.co/R3J5pCjUho

Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently

Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.

ben.balter.com

Exactly 10 years ago today, I 🚢'd my first GitHub feature, GeoJSON rendering. The base layer has since moved from MapBox to Azure Maps, but the feature is still rendering more than 7 million maps a year across more than 27 million .geojson files. https://t.co/1NiPrgsW0o

There's a map for that

Not long ago, we began rendering 3D models on GitHub. Today we’re excited to announce the latest addition to the visualization family – geographic data. Any .geojson file in a…

github.blog