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
hunk
hunk is an open source, review-first diff viewer for the terminal that plays nice with coding agents. It’s fast, it looks good, and your agent can leave review comments and annotations right in the diff beside you.
Sideshow
Sideshow gives your coding agent a stage: a live visual surface where it renders high-fidelity mockups, diagrams, diffs, and more, so you can evaluate and steer its work as it happens.
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.
Blog
I publish medium-length stories and essays on my blog, Syntactic Vinegar. Here’s the latest post:
Blog posts published elsewhere
- Distributed Tracing 101 for Full Stack Developers Sentry blog, 2021
- How we grew Sentry’s MAUs by rethinking invitations Sentry blog, 2020
- Four reasons why your source maps are broken Sentry blog, 2018
- Three tips for getting a talk accepted at Fluent Medium, 2016
- What the heck is “Script error”? Sentry blog, 2016
- How to write bulletproof function wrappers in JavaScript Sentry blog, 2016
- Capture and report JavaScript errors with window.onerror Sentry blog, 2016
- Debuggable JavaScript in production with source maps Sentry blog, 2015
- We need a modern, open source performance book Perfplanet, 2015
- The best tool for the job, isn’t always Medium, 2014
Speaking
State of Agentic Coding
State of Agentic Coding is a monthly podcast I co-host with Armin Ronacher. It’s a field report from the fast-moving edge of AI software development – how coding agents are changing the practice, and economics, of making software.
Podcast appearances
- Cloudflare Analytics Engine, Workers + more w/ Ben Vinegar Syntax, 2024
- Reflecting on ladders, acquisitions, and personal trajectory at Sentry Engineering Unblocked, 2023
- Ben Vinegar × Distributed Tracing and TypeScript Migrations Syntax, 2022
- The new definition of frontend development Code[ish], 2020
- Why error monitoring must be close to your code The New Stack Podcast, 2020
- Debugging third party JavaScript JavaScript Jabber, 2020
Talks
- Navigating the JavaScript error-handling minefield VueConfTO, 2019 🇨🇦
- JavaScript errors demystified Destination:Web @ Uber, 2019 🇺🇸
- Source maps through the looking glass JSConf EU, 2017 🇩🇪
- JS error reporting and why we can’t have nice things JSConf UY, 2016 🇺🇾
- Re-evaluting front-end performance best practices Full Stack Toronto, 2015 🇨🇦
- Backbone at Disqus: a postmortem BackboneConf, 2014 🇺🇸
- Seamless iframes: the future, today HTML5DevConf, 2013 🇺🇸
- Modern iframe programming TXJS, 2011 🇺🇸
Panels
- Static to dynamic and back again Future of Frontend, 2020 (moderator) 🌐
- Build process Edge Conference London, 2014 (moderator) 🇬🇧
- Third-party scripts Edge Conference NYC, 2013 🇺🇸
Contact me
The best way to reach me is over email.
Please note I do not respond to solicitations from recruiting agencies, outsourcing firms, product salespeople, etc.