Product leader for developer platforms and open source
- GitHub
- A decade on developer platforms and trust and safety, most recently as a director
- Book
- Open and Async, the playbook for remote and distributed teams
- Education
- JD and MBA, George Washington University; DC Bar member
- Based in
- Washington, DC
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: 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. 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. 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.
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.
Start here
Good first reads if you're new here.
- Work loudly
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.
- How to one-on-one
Most 1:1s waste your team's only protected synchronous time on status updates. Here's how to run ones worth showing up for.
- How I over-engineered my book
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.
- The Zen of GitHub
Call it taste, culture, or zen — every organization has shared assumptions that guide decisions and resolve ambiguity in pursuit of its mission.
- 15 rules for communicating at GitHub
How GitHub used issues and chat for async communication: fifteen rules that eliminate the 'you had to be there' problem in corporate workflows.
- GitHub for non-developers: a beginner's guide
No coding required. A plain-English guide to GitHub issues, pull requests, Markdown, and notifications for product managers, designers, legal, and ops.
- How I re-over-engineered my home network for privacy and security
How I used Docker Compose, Ansible, and Caddy to re-over-engineer my network setup for easier maintenance, treating my Raspberry Pi like cattle, not a pet.
- Why everything should have a URL
When knowledge lives in people's heads and inboxes, it doesn't scale. Giving decisions and processes URLs makes context discoverable, async, and opt-in.
- Why you should work asynchronously
Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and unlocks flow beyond Cold War-era workflows.
Get in touch
Email is the best way to reach me: ben@balter.com. I'm also on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
