benbalter / benbalter.github.com

The personal website of Ben Balter. Built using Jekyll and GitHub Pages. See humans.txt for more infos.

Elsewhere on the internet

 

Popular blog posts

• 15 rules for communicating at GitHub
• The seven habits of highly effective GitHubbers
• The six types of pull requests you see on GitHub
• Why everything should have a URL
• Why open source
• Diff (and collaborate on) Microsoft Word documents using GitHub

About Ben

Ben Balter is the Director of Engineering Operations and Culture at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as Chief of Staff for Security, he managed the office of the Chief Security Officer, improving overall business effectiveness of the Security organization through portfolio management, strategy, planning, culture, and values. As a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.

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benbalter.github.com's Issues

Bio calls to action should be links

Lean, Iterative, Decentralized, Open

Blog post (series?) On awesome gov projects, like crowd sourced maps

How to introduce two people

• Who to to, who to CC
• Who they are factually
• What they care about
• Common ground, the hook

The store that only sells one thing.

United States, get on this level

Better linking to GitHub repo

and encouragement of pull requests

Note footnotes off

a tragic loss - the .gov tracker

The .gov tracker, as linked on http://ben.balter.com/2011/09/07/analysis-of-federal-executive-domains/, looks like it may be in trouble. There's a vicious error message from cloudflare, something about how I'm not supposed to be on the internet.

Hope that the tracker comes back. It's damn useful.

H1 Font does not load in FF

FUD: Releasing open source is a security risk

Something with maps

Surface definition of open source exchange

How I would have done FCC.gov

Don't justify text

cc @nacin

Can't open "more" links in new tab

It's the little things

Compare

• Welcome bag
• Cookies at Elevator
• Box lunch
• Internet
• Massages, snacks, study rooms

Contrast

• No wallet
• No erasers
• Suit and Tie

Clear instructions on how to fix everything in government. Right now, this only addresses about half.

:) Congratulations!

What is a hacker?

http://gov20.govfresh.com/think-different-about-hacking/

Move fonts to submodule

Better caching

More cats please

JSON related posts simply list all posts in chron order

Trollin' on RDFa

e.g., https://twitter.com/benbalter/status/284309578441699328

Version control today is where computers were in the 1970s

Hobbyists and large corporations, great technical skill to operate, most dont see consumer need, etc.

Why no outsiders user government data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385623

An interesting micro-site – it seems very much more aimed at people who know BLS data already, and much less aimed at coders. The FAQ answers the question "What is an API?", but doesn't even have a list of the IDs required in order to get any data whatsoever out of that API. It does however point to this page which is helpful, if not comprehensive: http://www.bls.gov/help/hlpforma.htm

GitHub has nothing to do with code.

Well sorta.

Move to CC-BY

CC-BY-SA-NC

Open source is not a verb; it's a philosophy

Enough with the `athons and `paloozas

High visibility, low impact, low persistence

benbalter.com does not redirect

Add backbone

Fix Ustream link

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13186581

Port featured images

Add code license to fine print

Related to #12

Escape disqus title

This projects license is unclear from the source code

While the front end references http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ on http://ben.balter.com/fine-print/, this isn't obvious in the projects index.html or the non-existant readme or license.txt

How government.github.com came to be

Jekyll -> content

Everyone Contributes

Can't get to fine print

Infinite scroll blocks

Bet on the little guy

• SOAP / REST
• XML / JSON
• Everything / HTTP
• TCP/IP

Syntax code highlighting causes bug with <div> and <pre> tags

It only seems to be happening on one blog post with console and ruby highlighting, but my guess is that it's the ordered list items that are conflicting with the liquid tags. The list items have paragraph tags within which might also be contributing to the issue. Is that Kramdown causing the problem?

Example: http://ben.balter.com/2013/06/26/how-to-convert-shapefiles-to-geojson-for-use-on-github/

Great post, by the way.

Making the case for moving to Jekyll

Jekyll bot not working

Why WordPress's next version should just give it a REST already.

If there's one thing the internet does well, it's initially trying out many, but effectually settling on one design pattern. (IP, HTTP, etc.)

Crawl: add .json to any URL

Walk: Refresh most used admin pages using admin_ajax.php?action=update_post

Run: Redirect POST [post].json to admin_ajax backend.

Search

Friction

Open Source workflow fuels consumer technology

• Version control -> Drop Box
• @reply, hashtag -> twitter
• Text editor (VI) -> Word
• Bots -> IFTTT
• Trac ->

Rename repo to benbalter.github.io

it's important

N Things you learn moving from the world's most bureaucratic to the world's least bureaucratic organization

1 yr aniv....

• Trust
  • Room to fail
• Opt of Happiness
• External relationships are an asset

GIS people, a 500MB endpoint is not the way the internet works.