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Open and async on the Overcommitted podcast

2 min read
: What makes remote engineering teams work comes down to how you communicate, not where you sit—the throughline of a conversation on the Overcommitted podcast about async-first culture, decision durability, and the ideas behind Open and Async.

A decision without a URL gets relitigated forever. (share this quote) What makes a remote engineering team actually work comes down to how you communicate, not where you sit. Most of it is a set of habits you can build.

Those habits are the backbone of Open and Async, and the throughline of a conversation with Bethany Janos and Erika Eggemeyer on the Overcommitted podcast: why async is the operating system and remote is the hardware, how to run a stack where chat coordinates but issues and discussions carry the durable decisions you can point to six months later, and why you measure outcomes instead of keystrokes.

The conversation runs to the nerdier end too—the absurd, over-engineered CI pipeline behind the book (a rabbit hole that’s getting its own post soon), the aspirational automation that syncs my standing desk to my calendar, and where AI actually belongs when you write.

You can listen to the full conversation over on the overcommitted website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Originally published July 28, 2026 View revision history
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Ben Balter

I'm Ben Balter — I write here about engineering leadership, open source, and showing your work. I wrote Open & Async, the playbook for remote and distributed teams. My open source projects have hundreds of millions of downloads. I was the Director of Hubber Enablement at GitHub, where I helped thousands of GitHubbers do their best remote work. Before this role: Chief of Staff for Security, enterprise PM, and GitHub's first Government Evangelist. Before GitHub: attorney, Presidential Innovation Fellow, and member of the White House's first agile development team. More about the author →

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