If you had access to virtually unlimited GitHub Copilot usage and could build anything, how would you use it to contribute to/better the open source community? What problems aren’t being solved because they’re too labor intensive? Example: rewrite Jekyll.rb as Jekyll.js to modernize it.

Can AI moderate open source communities to keep conversations productive? I created a quick GitHub Action that looks at issues/PRs/comments and can take moderation actions (warn, hide, lock, etc.) based on AI's evaluation of the content. Ideas/feedback welcome. github.com/benbalter/ai...

Archived more than 4,000 inactive Slack channels today with a quick GitHub Action Copilot and I whipped up. I hope to open source “Slack Stale Archiver” after it’s been running for a bit. Encouraging people to post their favorite animated GIF to keep the channel active has been the best part so far.

Blog entry: Why I work in the open. I’ve long worked in the open, overwhelmingly for one reason: it increases enormously the surface area for success.

Slack channel name squatting is the new domain squatting.

I see the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is making the rounds again in some circles. Thought it was timely to share this post again on my updated take: ben.balter.com/2016/01/15/h...

If you do a lot of writing and are looking for a grammar, style, and spell checker that doesn't send what you write to a third party service, I wrote up instructions for how to setup and use the open source LanguageTool locally on your machine. ben.balter.com/2025/01/30/h...

I still have an irrational fear of @mentioning people in private Slack channels, ever since that one time that I @mentioned the CEO, accidentally clicked the wrong button, and ended up inviting him into the channel. At least he laughed at the creative channel name? 🤷‍♂️ Now I’m a backticks-only person.

Developers, do you want to verify yourself here but don't have a personal domain? You can use your GitHub account! 🦋🐱 I temporarily renamed myself to @nicolo-ribaudo.github.io :)

Reorgs are the organizational equivalent of turning it off and back on again.

Why everything should have a URL http://bit.ly/1MoMnQI

10+ years later and I still don’t have an answer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Always be answering questions with URLs.

If you liked it then you should have put a URL on it.

Submitted a pull request to the closest thing GitHub has to an org chart. Merged or not, more companies should vet big changes in the open.

If you’re at GitHub Universe, come say hey! 👋

Remote since day one, GitHub learned a lot about how to communicate across time zones. We created an internal “how we communicate” doc, which we’re sharing with the world today. TL;DR: we use GitHub Actions and OpenAI to solve for information overload. PR’s welcome! github.blog/2023-10-04-h...

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. https://t.co/R3J5pCjUho

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. https://t.co/1NiPrgsW0o

Practice inclusive scheduling. When working as a distributed team, be mindful of cultural differences, time zones, encouraging breaks between meetings, and connecting as humans. https://ben.balter.com/2023/05/19/practice-inclusive-scheduling/

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. https://t.co/RrmuMZgR3A

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. https://ben.balter.com/2023/03/02/github-for-non-technical-roles/

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)?

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. https://ben.balter.com/2023/03/02/github-for-non-technical-roles/

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.😂

Fish sticks are really having their moment.

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. https://ben.balter.com/2023/01/10/manage-like-an-engineer/

Is there a good solution for ad/tracker blocking on mobile (for browser AND apps)? I use AdGuard at home (https://t.co/U04oSSZFjM), 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. 🤷‍♂️

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. https://t.co/SK3Ku4tjdb

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”. https://t.co/0j...

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. https://t.co/N69c57cRyT

At GitHub, we use GitHub to manage access to GitHub. Need access to that new service? Submit a pull request and your manager will review. Better yet, access can be driven by the org chart automatically. So excited to see Entitlements shared with the world. https://t.co/UMS1o5wJEP

I missed it when it was first published, but just as true today, @sm_debenedetto does a great job telling the story of their transition to remote work at GitHub and how they realized that *async* was the crucial ingredient to making remote work, well work. https://t.co/QTpRS7qrKU

Why should your team work asynchronously? Async is the key to remote work. Inclusivity, better outcomes faster, opt-in shared context, space for learning, solving higher value problems, work-life balance, team distribution, and parallelization and flow. https://ben.balter.com/2022/03/17/why-async/

Does anyone have any good, concise resources that make the case for why an individual, a team, or an organization should choose to work asynchronously? If not, what are your most persuasive motivations? What convinced you to prefer async? How do you show others its value?

This is a great opportunity for someone who's passionate about communication and information security, building products developers love, or software development generally. If that's you, I encourage you to apply. My DMs are open if you have any questions. https://t.co/yaKSxqSE2T

As a #PiDay-adjacent project, I hooked up an RGB LED matrix to an old Raspberry Pi, got it to pull events from my calendar, & now it sits over my shoulder in meetings, subtly counting down the time remaining at set intervals to keep things on track. Code: https://github.com/benbalter/meeting-matrix

Zoom feature request: a button that places the presenter's Google Sheets/PowerPoint/Keynote in presentation mode when they share their screen with their slides still in the edit view.

What does a (corporate) Chief of Staff do? Not too long ago, my main point of reference was Leo McGarry from the West Wing, but after having been a Chief at GitHub for some time now, I wrote up the overview I wish I had when I first stepped into the role: https://t.co/trn3mu3QON

When you Google a problem and the first result is the GitHub issue you opened exactly six years and two weeks ago. 🤦‍♂️

This is a great opportunity for someone who's passionate about privacy and software development. Happy to answer any questions if you're interested (DMs are open). https://twitter.com/jeffbe/status/1498764055011631104

I'm a bit out of practice, but I wrote about how to gain the benefits of transparency, leaders must hold themselves and each other accountable for "showing their work" – communicating not only the decision made, but also how the decision was made, and why. https://t.co/SRS6RFmdDU

You can now use GitHub mobile (iOS or Android) as an additional factor when logging in to http://github.com. https://github.blog/2022-01-25-secure-your-github-account-github-mobile-2fa/

From @MikeMcQuaid on saying "No": "An API that attempts to accommodate your request and consistently times out rather than failing immediately is terrible. Humans relationships are like APIs: consistent and predictable responses make them more pleasant." https://t.co/qSjqywCSU3

I'm hiring a Communications and Education Manager to help engage GitHubbers and the GitHub community around all things #infosec. If you have a passion for internal comms, executive comms, or security awareness training I encourage you to apply. DMs open. https://t.co/5jcvkFSw2n

I joked that my pandemic hobby had been to feel guilty about not studying for the CISSP, but with the new year, I can officially add 5 more letters after my name. Being in DC, does that mean I need to start prepending the prefix "cyber" to more words now? https://t.co/EUGHzH5A8S

Really awesome to see the history of code search at GitHub celebrated like this. All too often, we, as an industry, focus on the new shiny thing and how it improves on the status quo, without honoring the sometimes decade or more of thinking that came before and made it possible. https://t.co/7B...

Ever want to get notified when an API endpoint (or web page) changes? I was recently in the dark as to when an eagerly-expected purchase would arrive, so naturally, I built a GitHub Actions workflow to repeatedly call an API and text if the status changed. https://t.co/0jAOZbvLYs

Ever need to create "welcome" or "thank you" slides with a bunch of avatars for your all hands or similar team meetings? I do, frequently enough that I created https://github.com/benbalter/avatar-montage to automate the process. Special thanks to @martinwoodward & @jhutchings0 for their prior art.

Me nearly every day: I have a follow up question to that sidebar from the other week. Let me just remember the exact combination of 7 (or was it 8?) people that were in it so that I can find the right group DM to continue the thread. Normalize named, temporary Slack channels.😎 https://t.co/sXh...