v1.0.0 — Open and Async is out

After more than a decade of remote-first work and a lot of pull requests, the book is out.

Open and Async: The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams is now available in paperback and ebook.

👉 Get it: https://open-and-async.com

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Working from home ≠ working remotely. Most companies survived the pandemic by shipping everyone a laptop, bolting Zoom onto the same approval chains, and calling it remote work. That's office work in sweatpants — same meetings, same status theater, just piped through a webcam.

This is the opinionated, practical playbook for the two practices that make distributed work actually work: working in the open and communicating asynchronously. Async is the operating system; remote is the hardware.

What's inside

• Treat meetings as escalation, not default — and reclaim the hours you lose to "quick syncs"
• Give every decision a URL, so context survives reorgs, departures, and Slack purges
• "Work loudly" so your impact is visible without performing busyness
• Measure impact over input
• Lead — whether or not you have direct reports — by showing your work
• Hire, onboard, and transition teams to remote-first without losing what made them work

For managers: build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination, and retain your best people by respecting their time.

For individual contributors: become visible, effective, and promotable on the strength of your work — not the luck of your seating chart.

Why this repo?

This is the book's feedback repo. Found a typo, a broken claim, or a link that decays? Have a story where open and async worked (or didn't)? Open an issue. Errata land here, and reader feedback shapes future printings — this book was built in the open, and it stays that way.

Changelog

• Added: ~576 pages, 10 sections, paperback + EPUB, wide distribution (Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and more)
• Verified: six editing passes, EPUBCheck-clean, WCAG 2.1 AA accessible
• Known issues: the office isn't going to digitize itself. That's kind of the point.

Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.

⭐ If it's useful, star the repo and tell one person who's stuck in back-to-back meetings.

GIF vs JIF — the Chat chapter, both ways

The Open and Async audiobook is read by a synthetic narrator who says "jif." Correctly.

For the hard-G crowd who insist that's heresy, here's the entire "Chat Responsibly" chapter re-recorded in their (wrong) pronunciation — beginning to end. Same words, same narrator, one phoneme of difference. Pick your fighter.

• Open-and-Async-Chat-Responsibly-JIF-edition.mp3 — soft-G, the correct one. This is the actual audiobook narration.
• Open-and-Async-Chat-Responsibly-GIF-hard-G-edition.mp3 — hard-G, rendered on purpose. A bug shipped as a public service.

The full story: https://ben.balter.com/2026/09/08/gif-or-jif-audiobook-both-ways/

Want the whole thing, eleven and a half hours and not one hard G? The full audiobook is out: https://open-and-async.com/go/audiobook?src=gif-jif-release

(Narrated with a synthetic voice — Azure "Andrew" Dragon HD.)