Ben Vinegar

Hey! I’m Ben, and I’ve been a product developer and engineering leader in startups for almost 20 years.

Today I’m working on my own startup, Modem. We’re building an agentic “auto-triage PM” to assist developer teams build great software.

Before Modem I worked at Sentry for nearly 10 years. There I went from employee #2 to VP Engineering, VP Emerging Technology, and even GM of Syntax.fm, the popular web development podcast.

I’m also the co-author of Third-party JavaScript, a contributor to O’Reilly’s Beautiful JavaScript, and an occasional conference speaker.

You can also find me on Bluesky, Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Work

At Modem, we believe AI will soon write 99% of code. At which point coding won’t be the slow part – everything else will.

That’s why we’re building an agentic system that gives software teams their own auto-triage PM. Modem does the context-gathering busy work for you, bringing product insights wherever you get work done, like your IDE or coding agent.

To learn more, go to the Modem website and subscribe for updates, or follow us on X or LinkedIn.

Projects

Counterscale

Counterscale is a simple open source analytics tracker and dashboard designed to run on Cloudflare’s developer cloud. It’s easy to deploy, zero effort to maintain, and costs pennies to run even at high levels of load.

Writing

Third-party JavaScript

Released in 2013 by Manning Publications and co-authored with Anton Kovalyov, Third-party JavaScript teaches readers how to build embedded JavaScript applications like widgets and analytics scripts. It has been translated and sold in several languages, including Standard Chinese, Japanese, and Portugese.

Beautiful JavaScript

From 2015, Beautiful JavaScript is a collection of 15 discrete chapters contributed by leading JavaScript programmers like Angus Croll, Jenn Schiffer, Nicholas Zakas, and Ariya Hidayat. I contributed a chapter on abusing JavaScript constructors to seamlessly introduce the factory design pattern.