I write about engineering leadership, open source, and the messy human problems that surface when you scale a team
— remote work, collaboration, communications debt, showing your work.
New posts land here whenever I publish. No schedule, no filler, no growth-hacking tips.
Pick your channel below — email, RSS, reader, or mobile — and unsubscribe in one click if it's not for you.
You get the invite. No description. No agenda. No attached document. Just a title like “Quick sync” and a 30-minute calendar hold. You accept it anyway, because what else are you going to do — decline a meeting with your skip-level?
I’ve written before about how me...
Context: I, human @benbalter, asked GitHub Copilot’s coding agent to “Add agentic workflows” to my personal blog repo. That was the entire prompt. I was hoping AI could automate thin...
import GitHubCulture from ”../../components/GitHubCulture.astro”;
Context: 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 “Hubberversar...
You may be familiar with grammar checking tools like Grammarly,1 but if you’re privacy-conscious like me, you likely don’t want to send everything you type to a third-party service (or may be prohibited f...
Every seasoned leader I’ve worked with has had to make an unpopular or controversial decision. It’s one of the hallmarks of good leadership. But almost as important as the decision itself, is how you engage with your team following the decision.
It’s understandable. You spend days, weeks, maybe months agonizing over ever detail, every pro and con, every possible outcom...