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.
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It’s Thursday afternoon. Your direct report sits down and reads from a list: “Closed three bugs, reviewed two PRs, started the migration doc.” You nod. They nod. Thirty minutes pass without either of you saying anything that couldn’t have been a comment on an issue.
Most 1:1s fail in one of three ways:
The most common: spending your team’s only protected synchrono...Here’s the best career advice I ever received as a product manager: “product-manage your own career.” I wish I’d internalized it sooner. Early in my career, I stayed quiet and did good work, assuming the right people would notice. Spoiler: they didn’t—not because the work wasn’t good, but because nobody else was tracking it.
Treat yourself as a product. What are your f...
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...