Media
Talks, podcasts, book chapters, and open-source projects by Frank Chen, co-founder and CTO of Balto Energy. A very incomplete list of projects, references, etc. Roughly ordered chronologically.
2026
The Company as a Codebase: running Balto on Palantir Foundry [palantir devcon talk] [the essay]. Talk at the Palantir Startup Fellowship DevCon, published on Palantir’s channel as Startup Fellowship 002: Balto Energy | DevCon 6. Every workflow ships two artifacts—the result, and a versioned improvement to the system that produced it. Foundry is the operating layer that company context graph deploys to, not a dashboard on top of it: 500+ submissions from a team where eight key contributors had never written code. The demo covers experience sampling applied at ontology scale—a thirty-second prompt fires at eighteen gates of the install lifecycle, and each answer becomes a capture linked to the job and the person who caught it.
O’Reilly’s Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition [oreilly] [free copy via honeycomb]. Contributor, returning from the 2022 first edition. This time on ontologies as a shared language for humans and AI: a shared semantic model of a sociotechnical system lets people and agents describe the same reality, which is what makes an AI workflow debuggable rather than merely instrumented. Ontologies give the vocabulary, evals give the feedback, and together they are a reliability practice rather than a modeling exercise.
2025
Agile Electrification [agileelectrification.org]. Co-started with the UC San Diego Design Lab and sponsored by the UC San Diego Foundation—clean, abundant, distributed energy for California homes. It runs as a living laboratory rather than a conference: contractors and researchers simulate how homeowner batteries actually respond to the grid under different policy conditions, so questions about market design get answered from first principles instead of inherited from utility program design. Open and non-pay-to-play. The annual convening was October 3, 2025, with a fireside between Katherine Ellison and Don Norman on humanity-centered design for energy abundance.
2023
AI Powered Development Workflows: Sharing initial experiments with generative models and their challenges in developer workflows [Developer Experience Summit]. I delved into the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models into the developer workflow, exploring initial experiments with AI-powered code review in open source repositories at Slack.
AI Has Entered the Chat: Humans, AI, and the Art of Collaboration [craftconf talk] [talk references]. I explored the potential of integrating large language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents into our work processes.
BabyAGI on Slack [tweet] [video] [github]. Agents are game changers I’m building on top of @yoheinakajima ‘s babyagi code, backed by Pinecone + Slack.
SlackGPT [tweet] [github]. Use this starter application to explore interacting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT inside of Slack. I discovered ChatGPT is way more powerful than expected. It’s exciting, sometimes wrong, and delightful all at once. Feedback loops with AI whereever we’re working is a step-wise gain in productivity.
2022
O’Reilly’s Observability Engineering [oreilly] [pdf via honeycomb] [webinar]. Chapter contributor. Slack gained powerful troubleshooting insights by applying observability to their software delivery practice. We also delve into specific continuous integration (CI) / continuous deployment (CD) architectures and how observability can be used to debug pipeline issues.
Circuit Breakers for Slack’s CI/CD [slack.engineering] [youtube] [craftconf talk] [talk references] How Slack increased developer productivity and prevented cascading internal failures by implementing orchestration-level circuit breakers
Slack’s Sociotechnical CI/CD Refactor [slack.engineering] [blog via infoq]. A story of evolving socio-technical workflows that increased developer velocity and redefined confident testing and deploy workflows at Slack.
2021
Tracing in CI [strange loop talk] [o11ycon talk] [talk references] [blog on talk via honeycomb] [blog on customer wins via honeycomb]
Infrastructure Observability [slack.engineering] [podcast via Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn]. A deep dive on how we crafted an order of magnitude change in our spend (10x reduction compared to baseline growth) over the last two years with iterative understanding and changes in Slack’s Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure.