Ben Vinegar

Hey! I’m Ben, and I’ve worked as a product developer and engineering leader in startups for almost 20 years. Most recently I worked at Sentry, where I was employee #2 and later held roles including VP Engineering, VP Emerging Technology, and even GM of Syntax.fm, the web’s most 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

Syntax is a popular web development podcast hosted by Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Twitter, and YouTube.

Sentry is a source-available SaaS product that helps software teams understand how their application code is performing in production. Sentry is funded by Accel, NEA, and BOND, and our customers include leading technology companies like GitHub, Instacart, Riot Games, and many others.

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.