Ben Vinegar
@bentlegen
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Following
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Worked on @getsentry for nearly a decade. Co-wrote Third-party JavaScript. Hacking on https://t.co/SXHld4AuTB. 🇨🇦
Toronto, Canada
Joined February 2007
tech job market indicator:. Spotify is a publicly traded company valued at $52B and employs ~9,000 people worldwide. but at this moment, there is not a single engineering job you can apply for
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people have pointed out that mixing client and server code is unsafe, so i made a new safer version
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I maintain the biggest flex is having a desk that's in the middle of a room and not against a wall.
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Crypto miners literally bought a coal power plant to exclusively mine crypto (it was going to be decommissioned). Crypto and its harm to the environment is not an abstract, “theoretical” concept; here it is in black and white.
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👋 Hey front-end developer friends. Wanna beta a new tool we're building to help you understand the performance of your production SPAs? I'd really value your feedback 🙏
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I don’t understand the agenda of “web development is too complicated now” people … what is the endgame?.
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Cloudflare analytics engine pricing dropped yesterday:. → free plan allows up to 100k writes/day.→ paid plan (just $5/mo) includes 10mm writes/month. it's now official: you can host on CF and record 100k analytics events/day for free 🤯
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👋 Some news: Friday is my last day at @getsentry. Hard to believe it, cause this is the kind of job and outcome I've always wanted. To build a product and company that helps so many devs ship better software, that's cool and supports open source? At this size and scale?
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In January I spent about 3 hours trying to convert my personal website to @gatsbyjs. Then I asked myself “what the hell am I doing”, uploaded an index.html file and called it a day.
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Having a bunch of dotfiles in a folder is not indicative of needless complexity. It is an acknowledgment that this was always complicated, but now we have tools to deal with it. I would never go back.
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📈 last week i sent 1 million tracking requests to counterscale to verify my napkin math around costs. the answer: yes, Cloudflare charges $0 for 100k events/day, or $5/month for 1 million events/day 💪. perfect for the 6 people who visit my blog each day
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This is the 2nd year in a row where we've posted this announcement to Hacker News, in hoping to draw attention to OSS funding and encourage others to follow. It's the 2nd year in a row we've hit the front page only to have HN mods remove it.
We just gave $500,000 to Open Source maintainers. Read more from @chadwhitacre_ on how, why, and to learn a bit more about Foss Funders 👇.
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decided on a name and made this landing page. thoughts?
holiday project: end-to-end web analytics (tracking script, event ingest, dashboard). The stack: .• Remix.• Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Analytics Engine (beta). ⬆️ upside: practically free (CF gives 100k req/day free), easy to run.⬇️ downside: only 90 day retention for now
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🇨🇦 If you’re in Toronto building software tools and/or open source products, I’d love to provide some assistance if I can (e.g. advice, be a sounding board, connections, whatever). No agenda besides a desire to see more things happen here.
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this 4kb script on the new @syntaxfm website seems like no big deal at all, BUT. → it's render blocking.→ it takes ~500ms to download on average, in production, by real users (despite being "just" 4kb). it's more than just bytes folks
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🔥 frontend developers: we live in a golden era where software tools can alert you when your app's LCP gets out of control
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Before Prettier I spent needless hours bikeshedding code style minutiae with my coworkers. If you want those days back, delete .prettierrc and go nuts.
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if you're suffering from tech decision fatigue, i wrote about a story from earlier in my career that helped me understand what's actually important. I hope folks find it helpful + mildly interesting.
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Big thank you to all the library authors, framework developers, and open source toolsmiths out there. You all rock. 🙏.
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did y'all know @getsentry surfaces errors on PRs like this now? this was a real bug that was caught. PR:
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Insane trajectory for what was originally a Django plugin written in 71 lines of Python.
There's one other awesome milestone we're celebrating: last year we crossed $100 million in ARR at Sentry, and are now supporting more than 100,000 customers on our cloud service. 2015-me is still rolling his eyes at that possibility.
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🎁 sentry gave us all custom mechanical keyboards for the holidays. here's an unboxing video (🎶 sound recommended for ASMR)
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🇨🇦 Hey software friends,. I'm starting a "DevTools Toronto" meetup for folks to connect, talk shop, and complain about software. The first event is Thurs Aug 15th 6-9 PM at Mascot Brewing on King, and we've got a full roster of talented toolsmiths who'll be there. 👇 rsvp below.
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Before ESLint (or TypeScript), it was common to deploy syntax errors because of easy typos like misspelling “var” or “function”. If you want that freedom again, remove .eslintrc and step through the time machine.
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you wouldn't believe the value of having a friend that encourages you to be even just a little more ambitious.
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9 years 🎉.
proud to announce I'm joining my asshole friends @getsentry
http://t.co/1WFgCTHc12
http://t.co/Y4VkOyM7Fz.
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It’s incredible how fast our industry went from “html isn’t real programming” to “rust programmer thinks publishing a website is too hard”.
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Lots of communities claim to be "the next Silicon Valley" but it's mostly wishful thinking. The Toronto-Waterloo corridor might actually have a shot.
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look i'm just overly excited that i get to work at a company that does this year after year
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framework authors either die a hero, or live long enough to join google/facebook/linkedin
📣 I have an exciting announcement:.I'm joining the Chrome team @Google in the new year!.Looking forward to pushing the web. forward! 😊
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Montreal's one of my favourite cities; shame to be here for only 24 hours. But managed to get up early and take some photos of Old Town before flying out
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🇨🇦 I'm a guest CS lecturer today at U of T Scarborough – going to talk about building analytics services. here's a slide designed to appeal to the youth
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We transferred $260k to open source maintainers and foundations this year, up from $155k in 2021.
To all the open source maintainers out there: we appreciate you. Thank you for all your work. #Hacktoberfest .
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at some point we entered a world where sentry is objectively in the same league as atlassian, github, pagerduty, and datadog in terms of number of enterprise users. wild 🤯.
Sentry is proud to be named one of the most popular developer tools of 2021 by @Okta's Businesses at Work report.
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cool companies help sustain open source. hope we see some Toronto tech companies on this list in the future @Shopify @cohere @goclio @ada_cx @1Password @Wealthsimple @loopioinc @getflipp
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I wrote about Counterscale, Cloudflare’s Analytics Engine, and how evolving cloud primitives could bring a new era of self-hosted software. Appreciate your thoughts ✌️.
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🚨 Hey folks, help us fund webpack! @getsentry will match monthly contributions/sponsorships up to a total of +$200/month.
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👋 For the past year we've been building a developer-focused Session Replay tool to assist w/ debugging frontend errors and performance issues. For months, beta users have been telling us it's really helpful. It's now generally available for everyone.
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“Toronto tech renaissance” doesn’t have to be driven solely by builders and investors. Companies can help. If you have space, consider opening it up to meetups. Encourage your people to get involved and share what they know. Help develop a skilled future workforce.
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6/ There is an attitude out there that web development was "solved, actually" in some halcyon past, and that the community has made everyone's lives worse by needlessly fixing "non-problems". I disagree, and I think this is disrespectful to tool authors. Over free software!.
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Computer science fundamentals: understanding why sorting is expensive, or why a hash map is fast and in which situations you should use them.
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We adopted @storybookjs at @getsentry about 8 months ago and it's really accelerated how we build UI components:
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Btw this isn’t random. We started hiring new grads/interns from @UofT and Waterloo in ~2018 and “brain drained” them to SF. Over time it became more practical to build a Toronto presence and hire locally. Not everyone wants to move + some came back. Now there’s ~40 people here.
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🎉 We just passed Sentry's 7 year anniversary of being written in React. 7 years of a single frontend web framework. It's possible!.
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@dan_abramov hot take: that people strictly do it out of the kindness of their hearts. i mean sure, some do, but plenty do it for themselves: to build notoriety, connections, skills, a portfolio, etc. and that's 100% okay and great!.
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@sophiebits I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion. Code Complete (originally published in 1993!) dedicated several pages to the benefits of variable declaration proximity.
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getting in on this "2022 career announcement" train. i've changed roles at @getsentry – starting a new emerging technology department to build experimental new product stuff. 👉 we're building the team now! want to build new open source developer tools in 2022? shoot me a DM.
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today @getsentry along with other progressive software companies like @gitbutler and @keygen_sh have introduced "Fair Source". it's a type of software licensing that promotes end-user access while preserving developer sustainability. 👉 more here
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My HN account is 14 years old. I probably read it every other day. But these experiences have caused me to realize that HN's community voting is mostly an illusion; at the end of the day, the mods decide what plays and what doesn't.
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this drove way more traffic than I was expecting. gotta tweet about Cloudflare more, clearly
Cloudflare analytics engine pricing dropped yesterday:. → free plan allows up to 100k writes/day.→ paid plan (just $5/mo) includes 10mm writes/month. it's now official: you can host on CF and record 100k analytics events/day for free 🤯
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Toronto has the largest active streetcar system in North America. 11 active routes on 82 km of track. It also mostly has above ground power lines. Anyways here’s some pictures involving overhead wires
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to be clear i'm just being cheeky – next 14 looks cool, congrats team.
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As the web community kept discovering these AI-generated women conference speakers, I couldn't help but wonder . Who the hell is Uncle Bob?
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why use graphql when soon we’ll all be calling Postgres directly from a <ul> element?.
Still can’t believe we all got tricked into using graphql.
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so close to 1k stars – help push me over the edge?. made some minor improvements:.• fixed all the timezone bugs.• fixed table css issues by migrating to divs.• now strips query string from urls / more privacy-conscious
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holiday project: end-to-end web analytics (tracking script, event ingest, dashboard). The stack: .• Remix.• Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Analytics Engine (beta). ⬆️ upside: practically free (CF gives 100k req/day free), easy to run.⬇️ downside: only 90 day retention for now
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@jordwalke I read about this in Chaos Monkeys. It was inspiring! But I don't remember the part where everyone had to make a loyalty pledge by 5 PM or be fired.
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I’m glad I lived long enough to see this … almost feels not real.
<iframe loading=lazy> has landed. Lazily loaded iframes are only loaded when visible, speeding up initial page load. See
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is there a classy way to tell recruiters "only if you drive a dump truck of money to my house" 🚚 💵.
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finally, i no longer have to worry about javascript bundle size
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my side project – writing a javascript book – forever altered the trajectory of my life:. - became a legit expert at something.- spoke at conferences around the world & grew as a speaker/storyteller.- made friends with cool industry people.- used it all to help build @getsentry.
Side projects can change your life.
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"Why I ditched yesterday's popular framework for today's popular framework".
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Four Seasons’ website in 2006 - which handled room reservations, gift cards, payments, etc - worked by making a cgi-bin call into a hand-rolled interpreter for a custom language whose only documentation was an internal-only PDF. And the language didn’t support arrays.
Unpopular opinion: There hasn't been a harder time to be a software engineer. The critical pieces in everyone's stack are put together by duct tape. In contrast, it's impossible to build minimal alternatives in-house because the world we live in is ultra complex.
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"Code is easy, people are hard" - people deep in their careers, years removed from remembering how hard coding is when you're just starting.
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If you've ever wanted to contribute to OSS, here's a good opportunity. It can be as simple as filling in some TypeScript types or contributing some test coverage. Or give the software a whirl and tell me what's bad about it (probably a lot).
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⚡️ some news:. i'm now on the @syntaxfm team full-time to help bring the world more @wesbos and @stolinski – plus protect @getsentry's corporate interests. most meetings look something like this.
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@AdamRackis Dev advocates, who command like > 50% of this dialogue on Twitter, need something new to talk about. Basically, this “exhaustion” feels manufactured. Look at any npm download chart for Svelte.
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So, why go?. An outcome of tackling big problems like "how do we grow a company from 4 to 400 people?" or "how do we convince corps to give money to OSS?" is you start to build confidence that you can . just go and solve big problems. The impossible starts to seem less
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moving back to toronto has made me realize that it's nice to have a shared iconic landmark that's visible from nearly everywhere.
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Thanks to everyone who came out to DevTools Toronto last night 🙏. We had folks hang out who work on @rootlyhq @gitwallet @vltpkg @DevCycleHQ @SST_dev @solid_js @deno_land @bunjavascript @noti_api @UnifiedAPI @webappio @deskree_backend @getsentry and
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If you yearn for the halcyon web development days of the late 90s, I have good news for you: you can still use Dreamweaver, FTP, and static HTML in 2021. And it’s way easier and cheaper than ever!.
Why is it harder to make a website in 2021 than it was in 1996?.
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Day 1 at JSConf.uy - I am stuck in an elevator with 8 Uruguayans and a tray of ravioli. Please send help.
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it's hack week at @getsentry . this year i'm working out of our vienna office to get a 6 hour head start
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Addendum: it’s a fair criticism that this would all be easier if more basic common tools were baked into the platform, as they are in other languages/runtimes/etc. But over the past 10+ years a lot of that *has* happened. We’ve just taken it for granted.
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I like that our team invests in TypeScript because it's documentation enforced as code. It takes longer to use, because now you 100% must "document" the expected input and return values via types – before most people just skipped that part, or provided weak comments, etc.
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Between co-organizing @newdemos_ or whimsically raising $10,000 for a food bank, @tommytrxnh is a cool guy in our city trying to show the rest of us you can just do things.
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we've reached our international billboard phase. this one's in Berlin
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I think a frequent mistake Liberals make is that they underestimate the intelligence and savvy of their opponents. In late 2022, most wrote off Elon's purchase of Twitter as a colossal blunder. But if you paid attention .
Buying Twitter was a $44B call option.
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We're hiring in San Francisco, Toronto, and Vienna. 👉
Sentry raises $40 million for app performance monitoring tools by @Kyle_L_Wiggers.
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5 years at @getsentry today! Throwback to our marketing website from 2015 when our slogan was literally "shit happens"
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Idea: maybe you're all giving too much credit to a guy who maintains an 8 year old clone of a 16 year old bookmarking app.
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proud to announce I'm joining my asshole friends @getsentry
http://t.co/1WFgCTHc12
http://t.co/Y4VkOyM7Fz.
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Every year I do this job I become more aware of how little I know, and how much further there is to go. How folks can be so confident after 1-2 years in management that they pivot to paid training, newsletters, and books, I’ll never understand. What’s your secret?.
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1/ I intended this thread to be supportive of tools and libraries and their authors. I wanted to reflect on my belief that they're not needless distractions, but solving real problems that previously made web development unfun and frustrating.
I don’t understand the agenda of “web development is too complicated now” people … what is the endgame?.
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@syntaxfm @stolinski @wesbos @CodingGarden @kaitlinblooom @randyrektor Absent a plan, I am going to work on OSS and invest more time in Counterscale. If you use it (or even if you don’t), I’m super appreciative of feedback, issues, thoughts, notes - anything.
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I'm fucking tired of people complaining about Android fragmentation. Try programming for the web, you lazy miserable assholes.
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Today Disqus is an internet footnote. A dream of a distributed social network where you could take your profile and post anywhere – unrealized. But for a few years there – w/ millions of users, billions of views, unheard of distribution – it felt like it could actually happen.
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When SaaS products grow and the architecture starts to break down, two types of devs emerge:. 1. Those who believe the system is beyond repair and needs to be totally rebuilt. 2. Those who put their heads down and fix it one piece at a time. I've only seen group #2 be successful.
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i finally made this repo public – very open to help with issues, PRs, etc. you can also browse the landing page + live demo at
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🔥 Check out my deep-dive into capturing errors + stack traces via window.onerror
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This also means my time at @syntaxfm is ending. Super proud of the last year+ on this team, working with @stolinski @wesbos @CodingGarden @kaitlinblooom and @randyrektor. Can't tell you how much I've learned from this crew. They are as nice and talented behind the camera as
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