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GIF-vs-JIF is the one argument text can't settle. It only lives out loud. My audiobook narrator is a machine, and it picked "jif." Correctly. I also cut a chapter the wrong way, free, so you can settle it yourself: ben.balter.com/2026/09/08/g...
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.
I over-engineered a pipeline to avoid writing my book, then found the ebook already met WCAG 2.1 AA, mostly by accident. Turns out structure that passes an accessibility audit is the same structure an LLM reads. A screen reader and a language model want the same file. ben.balter.com/2026/08/27/a...
The ebook meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 Level AA) because the format wouldn't let me fake a heading and a browser audits every build, not because anyone scheduled a week for it. The parts Markdown can't check, like color contrast, axe-core catches under Playwright.
I built a CI pipeline for my book. Not a metaphor: ~5,500 automated tests, a linter that yells when I hyphenate "open source," and a build that spits out five formats on every git push. For a book I wrote by myself. Write-up: ben.balter.com/2026/08/17/h...
My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats (EPUB, Kindle, paperback ×2, and web) on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I built and published it the way I ship software.
If you've worked with me, you're likely aware of my infamous reorg calculator. It uses over-engineered statistics to predict the next reorg and over a decade+, it's been scarily accurate. The code is now open source so that you can predict when your next "Reorg Tuesday" github.com/benbalter/re....
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...
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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).
