Ben Balter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, 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.

Posts by this author

Engineering principles

How to communicate like a GitHub engineer: our principles, practices, and tools

Learn more about how we use GitHub to build GitHub, how we turned our guiding communications principles into prescriptive practices to manage our internal communications signal-to-noise ratio, and how you can contribute to the ongoing conversation.

Ben Balter, Allison MatlackOctober 4, 2023

Engineering principles
How the GitHub Security Team uses projects and GitHub Actions for planning, tracking, and more
Can projects and GitHub Actions be used by your non-developer teams? They absolutely can. Check out how our Security Team uses GitHub to run the department effortlessly.Ben BalterJuly 1, 2022
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Company news
Token authentication requirements for API and Git operations
As previously announced, beginning November 13th, 2020, we will no longer accept account passwords when authenticating with the REST API and will require the use of token-based authentication (e.g., a…Ben BalterJuly 30, 2020
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Maintainers
New tools for open source maintainers
We’re making it easier for maintainers to grow healthy open source communities on GitHub with minimized comments, retired namespaces for popular projects, and new pull request requirements.Ben BalterApril 18, 2018
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The library
A look behind our decision to standardize on a single Markdown engine for GitHub Pages
Two months ago, we announced that GitHub Pages is dropping support for the RDiscount, Redcarpet, and RedCloth (Textile) markup engines on May 1st. For the vast majority of users, this…Ben BalterApril 1, 2016
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Open Source
Open source license usage on GitHub.com
Open source simply isn’t open source without a proper license. Unless you’ve explicitly told others that they can modify and reuse your work, you’ve only showed others your code; you…Ben BalterMarch 9, 2015
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The library
Government opens up: 10k active government users on GitHub
In the summer of 2009, The New York Senate was the first government organization to post code to GitHub, and that fall, Washington DC quickly followed suit. By 2011, cities…Ben BalterAugust 14, 2014
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