Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights
Jul 28, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min · 14 segments
Learn how async-first communication transforms remote engineering culture and developer productivity. Ben Balter, open source governance expert, shares practical strategies for building transparent…
Ben BalterGuest
Bethany JanosHost
Erika EggemeyerHost
I think that backgrounds are so important to contributing to software and the software field.
Do you ever find your like legal business brain showing up in your in how you think about software or even how you think about open and async work?
So the first is the fun flex that I get to do where I used to be in the trust and safety space, which overlaps with legal a lot and compliance and regulatory.
And there's a lot of FUD, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a lot of lore about what you can and can't do.
And it's a lot of fun to be the only lawyer in the meeting and to be like, oh, Are you a lawyer? Because I am.
For me, and I actually worried about this in the book that I over indexed on this, law is about writing.
It's precedence based, right? Like one court makes a decision and then another court references it.
And so thinking about how to apply that idea of proof, of jurisprudence, of having a canonical record that you can point to and applying that to obviously much less important decisions in terms of like ADRs, architectural decision records, or why a pull request landed the way it did.
Yeah, it's interesting because even within the software development world, I have personally come up against people who either want a more closed culture or won't put their thoughts into writing.
Like, when is it appropriate to advocate for it? And then how do you advocate for it as somebody who might want to introduce some of these more open practices?
I think that backgrounds are so important to contributing to software and the software field.
Do you ever find your like legal business brain showing up in your in how you think about software or even how you think about open and async work?
So the first is the fun flex that I get to do where I used to be in the trust and safety space, which overlaps with legal a lot and compliance and regulatory.
And there's a lot of FUD, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a lot of lore about what you can and can't do.
And it's a lot of fun to be the only lawyer in the meeting and to be like, oh, Are you a lawyer? Because I am.
For me, and I actually worried about this in the book that I over indexed on this, law is about writing.
It's precedence based, right? Like one court makes a decision and then another court references it.
And so thinking about how to apply that idea of proof, of jurisprudence, of having a canonical record that you can point to and applying that to obviously much less important decisions in terms of like ADRs, architectural decision records, or why a pull request landed the way it did.
Yeah, it's interesting because even within the software development world, I have personally come up against people who either want a more closed culture or won't put their thoughts into writing.
Like, when is it appropriate to advocate for it? And then how do you advocate for it as somebody who might want to introduce some of these more open practices?
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