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