Ben Balter writes about technology leadership, open source, and modern collaboration at scale. His essays blend engineering mindset with management, community building, remote work, and transparent communication—shaped by years of experience at GitHub and in public-sector tech.
175 articles from this blog
Explores six common strategies for using pull requests on GitHub, from quick merges to detailed reviews and collaborative workflows.
Explores the key benefits of open source software, including cost savings, higher quality, and enabling developers to focus on high-value work.
GitHub's internal use of its own platform for non-code collaboration highlights four key traits of modern, open-source-inspired collaboration tools.
Explains the importance of using systems that assign URLs to decisions and processes to preserve organizational knowledge and context.
Analyzes the three major challenges hindering government IT: change aversion, lack of technocratic leadership, and non-scalable processes.
Explores how enterprises can adopt open source development workflows, like public bug trackers and transparent collaboration, to improve software quality and efficiency.
A tutorial on adding an 'improve this content' button to GitHub Pages sites, enabling collaborative editing via GitHub's web interface.
How GitHub uses automated testing tools to help developers write more user-focused, less corporate-sounding blog posts.
A former Presidential Innovation Fellow shares five core principles for successful government IT projects, focusing on culture, user needs, and modern development.
Explores the 'Zen of GitHub,' a set of guiding principles that shape GitHub's engineering culture and decision-making processes.
A GitHub engineer shares 12 practical tips for tech companies to write more human, less corporate blog posts about product updates.
Explores how government IT procurement is evolving from waterfall to agile methods and aligning with open source development practices.
Explains why applying closed-source, meeting-heavy workflows to open source projects leads to failure and advocates for asynchronous, transparent collaboration.
A guide on using GitHub Pages to create a custom, branded website for showcasing an organization's open source projects and efforts.
Explains best practices for copyright notices in open source projects, covering dates, copyright holders, and legal necessity.
Explains how to apply continuous integration (CI) and automated testing to website content using tools like Travis CI and HTML Proofer.
A 2015 analysis of U.S. .gov domains, tracking trends in HTTPS usage, IPv6, server software, CMS adoption, and common IT issues.
A GitHub staffer shares eight key technical lessons learned from six months of hands-on work with GitHub Pages.
Explains the distinct missions and approaches of two U.S. government tech modernization groups: 18F and the U.S. Digital Service (USDS).
A critique of government agency workplace culture, listing 19 reasons why technologists avoid public sector jobs and offering solutions.
