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Comment by benbalter

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Comment by benbalter

Fair. The project originally started as "turn my blog into a book", with a 1:1 mapping of blog post to chapter. I got feedback early on that that wasn't landing, but if you compare the outline on the book site to my blog archive, the original posts are still there.

Chapters built on an earlier post making the same argument:

- Why everything should have a URL → "Why URLs?" (2015) + "Expose process through URLs" (2014)

- Speak like a human → "Write corporate blog posts as a human" (2015)

- Optimize for developer happiness → "On stickers and optimizing for happiness" (2015)

- The zen of open and async work → "The zen of GitHub" (2015)

- Lead like an engineer → "Manage like an engineer" (2023)

- Rethinking management for remote teams → "Deprecate management" (2012) + "Cathedral–bazaar management" (2023)

- Retool your documents → "Word vs. Markdown" (2014) + "We've been trained to make paper" (2012)

- The etiquette of issues and pull requests → "Types of pull requests" (2015) + "Pull requests are a form of documentation" (2023)

- Showing colleagues they're valued → "Three easy ways to show employees you appreciate them" (2017)

- Choosing the right collaboration tools → "Tools of the trade" (2020)

- What I wish I knew before going remote → "Eight things I wish I knew my first week at GitHub" (2016)

- Career conversations → "The brag doc" (2026)

- Intro to software development for non-technical roles → "GitHub for non-technical roles" (2023)

And chapters that are near-verbatim descendants of a named post:

- Leaders show their work → "Leaders show their work" (2022)

- Work loudly → "Work loudly" (2026)

- Meetings are a point of escalation → "Meetings are a point of escalation" (2023)

- The Andon principle for knowledge work → "Transparency & collaboration is the Andon of knowledge production" (2023)

- Engaging with dissent → "Dissenting voices" (2024)

- How to 1:1 → "One-on-one playbook" (2026)

- Agentic workflows → "Agentic workflows" (2026)

- Why you should work asynchronously → "Why async" (2022)

Replies benbalter · 2026-08-17
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