Ben Vinegar
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benv.ca
Ben Vinegar
@benv.ca
Co-founder modem.dev. Before: founding engineer then VPE at
@sentry.io. Organizes Devtools Toronto. 🇨🇦

More: benv.ca
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👋 Hey, my quick bg:

Early 2010s, I worked on Disqus + put comments on everyone's websites.

Later, I wrote a book about it called Third-party JS.

2015, I joined @sentry.io to collect JS errors from everyone's web apps. Had stints as Sentry's VPE and GM of @syntax.fm.

Now: figuring out what's next
📕 When Third-party JavaScript came out in 2013, I was so burnt out I never followed up with an explainer or postmortem.

So, I decided to write one now, 10 years later.

benv.ca/blog/posts/t...
The Story of Third-party JavaScript
benv.ca
I want to dork around with new technology and talk about it the way I always have. That includes AI, LLMs, etc.

But the response to Armin's post here illustrates why that feels kind of hard on Bluesky. So my posting here has dropped a ton.
Is this platform still massively against AI or has it moved more towards acceptance?
November 26, 2025 at 2:25 PM
The soundtrack for deep, focused work
November 25, 2025 at 6:52 PM
I made a Chrome plugin that converts your typing speed to tokens/second (TPS) so you can compare your output to LLMs.

150 WPM = roughly 3.3 tokens/sec

(🔊 Sound on)
November 23, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Any startups/companies looking for a good TypeScript + JS developer?

I have someone in the US, remote, has a strong GitHub portfolio + OSS contributions. Let me know!
November 21, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Ben Vinegar
Curious if any Counterscale users are against this being enabled by default? tl;dr, we run a daily cron to backup the previous days analytics into an R2 bucket using the Apache Arrow file format
November 18, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Feels like the demand for OSS hasn't felt this low in a while:

1. People can just codegen what they want

2. Companies will use whatever gets them to market faster to capitalize on AI – if it's a black box so what

Touched on this on the Hard Part podcast.
November 18, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Got some new stickers made for Devtools Tronto tomorrow
November 3, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Ben Vinegar
Counterscale 3.3.0 it out! 🚀 Here's what's included
- UTM Tracking Support (!!!)
- @/counterscale/tracker now includes a server-side module for those that want to track analytics on the server
- @/counterscale/cli now verifies API tokens when settings them via the install command
Release v3.3.0 · benvinegar/counterscale
What's Changed fix: link pkgs via pnpm-workspaces.yaml instead of npmrc by @stordahl in #220 chore: upgrade zx by @stordahl in #219 Fix: Wrap Long URLs in TableCard Component by @congdv in #221 Tw...
github.com
October 15, 2025 at 7:08 PM
🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto is returning Tues, Nov 4th at BDC Community Square.

Featuring hands-on demos from 1Password, Tempo, Keyflow, Wispbit, and Varlock (DMNO)

👇 RSVP link below
October 9, 2025 at 12:02 AM
See you at the combination skate shop + punk show
October 4, 2025 at 3:29 PM
I've come to accept AI will write the majority of code.

So earlier this year I started exploring other ways AI could help developers.

That turned into this company, Modem. We're building an agent that does PM triage work for you and delivers product context to your IDE.

More here: modem.dev 🙏
Modem - Your dev-team's auto-triage Product Manager
Turn support, chat, and analytics into developer-ready context so engineers can decide, fix, and ship faster.
modem.dev
September 30, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Counterscale's still humming along – almost 2k GitHub stars now.

This summer we (mostly @stordahl.dev) added:

- user auth
- referrer favicons
- works w/ multiple CF accounts
- UTM tracking (PR lands soon)
September 15, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Ben Vinegar
I have some pretty exciting news to finally share here - in July, I joined @benv.ca as a maintainer on Counterscale, the open source analytics service that you deploy to your Cloudflare account! We just released v3.2.0-beta.0 which includes a long awaited feature - auth for your dashboard!
Release v3.2.0-beta.0 · benvinegar/counterscale
What's Changed Add noindex meta tag to Layout by @stordahl in #198 Improve init and add related functions by @stordahl in #205 custom 404 page done by @heyysiri in #206 chore: update React Router ...
github.com
August 13, 2025 at 1:10 AM
I like how you can be miles away and it still pops
August 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
The amount of learning I've had to do to become effective working/coding with LLMs is staggering.

Everyday employees aren't gonna figure this out in their spare time. You've got to intentionally carve out time for them to level up – or your team is gonna be left behind.
July 23, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Playing around w/ Midjourney to animate some pixel art scenes
July 18, 2025 at 8:07 AM
📈 React package downloads/day are up almost 70% (!) since the start of 2025
July 12, 2025 at 8:23 PM
I think I found the least maintained feature on @github.com
July 8, 2025 at 5:33 PM
🆕 new Counterscale landing page

I first mocked this up in Figma. Then exported a PNG and gave it to Claude Code.

That gave me a good start, but I spent hours tweaking afterwards in Claude + Cursor.
July 7, 2025 at 11:40 AM
Counterscale v3.1.0 is out:

🆕 now pick which Cloudflare org to deploy to if your user belongs to multiple orgs (thanks @sergical on GitHub)
🆕 now uses Wrangler v4
v3.0.0 beta of Counterscale is up. In this version:

🆕 CLI install wizard (using clack 🙏 @natemoo.re)
🆕 Deploys as a single Worker again / no more CF Pages
🆕 Uses pnpm for development

👇Video: self-deploy your own web analytics stack in 35s

github.com/benvinegar/c...
July 6, 2025 at 2:04 PM
doesn't matter how much time I spent here

visiting still feels magical
June 3, 2025 at 3:16 PM
I'm spending a few weeks in Vienna this summer after going hard w/ German on Duolingo + random German YouTube content for ~6+ months.

Will report back ...
Last week, was talking to person who used to a bug Duolingo user but realized they’re not learning a language they wanted (Vietnamese) and hired a tutor instead (talking remote over internet), quitting the app.

I wonder how long it takes for more people to realize the same.
May 26, 2025 at 8:28 PM
I don't even remember how my website is being served anymore, I push changes via Git and somehow it's updated 😅
Just how portable is your web site? Could you switch hosting providers in an hour? In a day? Would it take you a week?

You should think about it.
May 24, 2025 at 2:42 PM