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Ben Balter Profile
Ben Balter

@benbalter

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5K
Following
1K
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Director of Engineering Operations & Culture @GitHub. Previously @GitHub Security, @GitHub Trust & Safety, @pifgov.

Joined September 2008
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Not that there's much insightful there worth preserving, but if you're looking for my Tweets, you can find them archived at regardless of what happens to this site.
ben.balter.com
Historic archive of Tweets from @benbalter
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because async communication involves less frequent, but richer communication. There is less talking about the work and more doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.
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ben.balter.com
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and...
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Shoutout to the commenter on the thread who called me an intern and unknowingly created an inside joke / troll that continues to this day.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Also, the comments on the orange site are exactly what you'd expect. Amazing to see how developer centric we were, even back then, and how much feedback from that thread was implemented in the following weeks.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Exactly 10 years ago today, I 🚢'd my first GitHub feature, GeoJSON rendering. The base layer has since moved from MapBox to Azure Maps, but the feature is still rendering more than 7 million maps a year across more than 27 million .geojson files.
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github.blog
Not long ago, we began rendering 3D models on GitHub. Today we’re excited to announce the latest addition to the visualization family – geographic data. Any .geojson file in a…
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Practice inclusive scheduling. When working as a distributed team, be mindful of cultural differences, time zones, encouraging breaks between meetings, and connecting as humans.
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ben.balter.com
When working as a distributed team, be mindful of cultural differences, time zones, encouraging breaks between meetings, and connecting as humans.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
Pull requests are a form of documentation. When authoring a PR, use the body as an opportunity to document the proposed change, especially the “why”, and cross link any related issues or other PRs to create a trail of breadcrumbs for future contributors.
ben.balter.com
When authoring a pull request, use the body as an opportunity to document the proposed change, especially the “why”, and cross link any related issues or other PRs to create a trail of breadcrumbs...
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
If you're a Google Workspace user and are interested in pulling your own stats (calendar + email), I wrote a thing:
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github.com
Scrapes your GMail and Google Calendar data and returns it as a CSV for further analysis. - benbalter/gmail-and-google-calendar-stats
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
I made a few updates to my "Intro to GitHub for non-technical roles" article. Glad it has been helpful. Please keep the questions and feedback coming.
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ben.balter.com
GitHub isn’t just for software developers. If you’re in a non-technical role, you can use GitHub to follow along, collaborate with your team, track your work, and share information. This brief guide...
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
If you’re at a large(r) tech company that you joined when it was closer to a start up, what aspects of your organization’s culture or values do you wish you could purposefully preserve (or bring back)?.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
2 years
GitHub isn’t just for software developers. If you work with or alongside software development teams, this brief guide includes everything that you need to know to get started confidently with GitHub.
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ben.balter.com
GitHub isn’t just for software developers. If you’re in a non-technical role, you can use GitHub to follow along, collaborate with your team, track your work, and share information. This brief guide...
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
I’ve given the “life as a Hubber” onboarding talk for a year+ now. Each time I tell the story about how I adopted the “conjunction” y’all as a gender neutral reference to a group. 100s of Hubbers onboarded and not a single one pointed out that “y’all” is actually a contraction.😂.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
Fish sticks are really having their moment.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
If issues, pull requests, and project boards are the best way to develop software, should they not also be the best way to manage software development? . Make work visible. Write things down. Embrace collaboration. Manage like an engineer.
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ben.balter.com
If issues, pull requests, and project boards are the best way to develop software, should they not also be the best way to manage software development?
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
Is there a good solution for ad/tracker blocking on mobile (for browser AND apps)? I use AdGuard at home (, but I have different reasons for not trusting the two popular DNS filtering services, and running a wireguard split VPN eats 30%+ battery on iOS. 🤷‍♂️.
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ben.balter.com
How I used Docker Compose, Ansible, and Caddy to re-over-engineer my UniFi Dream Machine, PiHole/AdGuard Home, and Cloudflare-based home network for ease of setup, maintenance, and management.
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
RT @lukehefson: While interviewing, a number of companies have been interested in my QA/QE/quality team experience – especially since I swi….
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
If you work in or around a large organization, I can’t recommend @MarinaNitze and @NickSinai’s new book, “Hack Your Bureaucracy” enough. Just finished, and it’s the bureaucratic decoder ring for “getting things done” I wish I had when starting my career.
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amazon.com
Whether you just started your first entry-level job, run the entire company, or just feel trapped by your condo association bylaws, it's time to learn how to get big things done and make a lasting...
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
Today marks exactly one year for me as Chief of Staff for GitHub's Security team. To honor the occasion, I wrote a brief overview of how we use GitHub to secure GitHub, relying on Issues, Projects, and Actions, to power our planning and tracking organizational “operating system”.
@github
GitHub
3 years
We use GitHub in all kinds of ways to get work done, from technical to non-technical teams. Check out how the Security Team here at GitHub uses projects and GitHub Actions to plan, manage, and automate organizational work 🌟
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@benbalter
Ben Balter
3 years
If you maintain a Jekyll site, I wrote up a brief tutorial on how to use the Jekyll Sitemap plugin and a few lines of JavaScript to automatically have your 404 – not found page suggest similar (valid) URLs to the one requested.
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ben.balter.com
How to implement 404 - not found pages for Jekyll and GitHub pages that automatically suggest similar URLs to the one requested based on your site’s sitemap.xml.
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