About Ben Balter

I'm Ben Balter — I write here about engineering leadership, open source, and showing your work. By day I'm Director of Hubber Enablement at GitHub, where I help thousands of GitHubbers do their best remote work. Before this role: Chief of Staff for Security, enterprise PM, and GitHub's first Government Evangelist. Before GitHub: attorney, Presidential Innovation Fellow, and member of the White House's first agile development team.

The US CTO once called me one of "the baddest of the badass innovators" — the single nicest thing anyone's ever put in print about me. I helped draft parts of President Obama's Digital Strategy and Open Data Policy, and argued in the Public Contract Law Journal that federal IT procurement should look more like modern software development. Mostly, I've spent the last decade trying to figure out how large engineering organizations actually work — and why the obvious answers are usually wrong.

I hold a J.D. and M.B.A. from the George Washington University and am a member of the DC Bar. When I'm not trying to change the world, I enjoy tackling otherwise-impossible challenges to sharing information using nothing more than duct tape, version control, and occasionally a pack of bubblegum. Full resume.