# About Ben Balter

I'm Ben Balter, and I write here about developer platforms, product and engineering leadership, open source, and showing your work. I spent a decade building developer platforms at [GitHub](https://github.com/about): five years as a product manager for trust and safety, shipping 500+ features and the API endpoints behind them to 50M+ developers, plus a bottom-up rewrite of GitHub Pages and the open source library behind GitHub's license detection. My open source projects have hundreds of millions of downloads. I wrote [Open and Async](https://open-and-async.com/?utm_source=benbalter-bio), the playbook for remote and distributed teams, and shipped an MCP server alongside it so agents can query it directly. At GitHub I was also Director of Hubber (Employee) Enablement, owning the internal platform 4,000+ GitHubbers use to get their work done, Chief of Staff for Security, and the company's first Government Evangelist. Before GitHub: attorney, Presidential Innovation Fellow, and member of the White House's first agile development team.

The US CTO once called me one of "the baddest of the badass innovators," the single nicest thing anyone's ever put in print about me. I helped draft parts of President Obama's Digital Strategy and Open Data Policy, and argued in the Public Contract Law Journal that [federal IT procurement should look more like modern software development](/2011/11/29/towards-a-more-agile-government/). Mostly, I've spent the last decade trying to figure out how large engineering organizations actually work, and why the obvious answers are usually wrong.

I hold a J.D. and M.B.A. from the George Washington University and am a member of the DC Bar. When I'm not trying to change the world, I enjoy tackling otherwise-impossible challenges to sharing information using nothing more than duct tape, version control, and occasionally a pack of bubblegum. [Full résumé](/resume/).

## At a glance

- **Previously:** Director of Hubber Enablement, GitHub
- **Location:** Washington, DC
- **Education:** JD & MBA, George Washington University
- **Résumé:** [Full résumé](https://ben.balter.com/resume/)

## Popular writing

Most-read posts from the blog.

- [Work loudly](https://ben.balter.com/2026/07/14/work-loudly/) (July 14, 2026)
- [How to one-on-one](https://ben.balter.com/2026/04/27/one-on-one-playbook/) (April 27, 2026)
- [How I over-engineered my book](https://ben.balter.com/2026/08/17/how-i-over-engineered-my-book/) (August 17, 2026)
- [The Zen of GitHub](https://ben.balter.com/2015/08/12/the-zen-of-github/) (August 12, 2015)
- [15 rules for communicating at GitHub](https://ben.balter.com/2014/11/06/rules-of-communicating-at-github/) (November 6, 2014)
- [GitHub for non-developers: a beginner's guide](https://ben.balter.com/2023/03/02/github-for-non-technical-roles/) (March 2, 2023)
- [How I re-over-engineered my home network for privacy and security](https://ben.balter.com/2021/09/01/how-i-re-over-engineered-my-home-network/) (September 1, 2021)
- [Why everything should have a URL](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/12/why-urls/) (November 12, 2015)
- [Why you should work asynchronously](https://ben.balter.com/2022/03/17/why-async/) (March 17, 2022)

See [all posts](https://ben.balter.com/posts/).

## Get in touch

Email me at [ben@balter.com](mailto:ben@balter.com) or find me on these networks:

- [Email](mailto:ben@balter.com)
- [Add to contacts](https://ben.balter.com/vcard.vcf)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/ben.balter.com)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benbalter)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/benbalter)