Ben Vinegar
@bentlegen
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GM @syntaxfm at @getsentry . Co-author, Third-Party JavaScript. Career single-digit employee. 🇨🇦
Toronto, Canada
Joined February 2007
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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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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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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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🎁 sentry gave us all custom mechanical keyboards for the holidays
here's an unboxing video (🎶 sound recommended for ASMR)
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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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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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look i'm just overly excited that i get to work at a company that does this year after year
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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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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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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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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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🚨 Hey folks, help us fund webpack!
@getsentry
will match monthly contributions/sponsorships up to a total of +$200/month.
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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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“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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👋 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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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.
🇨🇦
@getsentry
isn't just the best software monitoring suite out there, it's the most Canadian too
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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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🎉 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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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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@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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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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to be clear i'm just being cheeky – next 14 looks cool, congrats team
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why use graphql when soon we’ll all be calling Postgres directly from a <ul> element?
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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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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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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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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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"Why I ditched yesterday's popular framework for today's popular framework"
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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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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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⚡️ 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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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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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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5 years at
@getsentry
today! Throwback to our marketing website from 2015 when our slogan was literally "shit happens"
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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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I'm fucking tired of people complaining about Android fragmentation. Try programming for the web, you lazy miserable assholes.
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We're hiring in San Francisco, Toronto, and Vienna
👉
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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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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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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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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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the biggest startup-y thing i've learned at
@getsentry
is that providing automatic value to customers without requiring user action is 10-100x more valuable than anything else you can do
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it is awesome and kind of insane that
@getsentry
is featured on GitHub Sponsors next to megacorps like
@awscloud
and
@Shopify
we sponsor a lot of stuff! ... and yet the bar still feels too low
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That's a wrap, folks: Third-party JavaScript is off to the printers. The final ebook edition is available now at
http://t.co/2eqEJxiuHR.
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🇨🇦 Most Canadians only make empty threats to move to the US from their keyboards
🌴 I got on the next flight to Miami to make an empty threat to move
We are not the same
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scene: the year 2021, survivors are huddled around a fire
woman: what did you do before the world ended?
man: blog about javascript fatigue
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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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Interesting:
http://t.co/kdK3fZpiV8
outputs a huge coloured message on the JS console to warn users against using it
http://t.co/biXDkgfa63
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10 years in SF working at startups and I never heard anyone complain about CA's high taxes curbing their desire to start companies.
When people talk about lack of ambition or risk-taking in Canada – this is it.
It's believing the government dictates your success and not you.
Bad day for Entrepreneurship in Canada 🇨🇦👎. Capital gains tax rate is increasing from a 50% inclusion to 66%.
This increases the net capital gains tax rate from 27% to 36%...
Compared to the US which has a 20% capital gains tax rate (+ major incentives like QSBS)
In my
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✌️ i have achieved my lifetime goal of authoring a blog post about using jira – on the jira blog
Learn from Sentry’s VP of Engineering how
@getsentry
sets up its incident management process with
@Jira
.
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Are any of my JavaScript friends looking for a new gig? Want to help build open source developer tools with us?
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we're doing one of those things where we announce a lot of stuff at once – next week
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IMO products are hurting their UI/UX by trying to growth hack "use our AI features" at the top of everything
for example, trying to edit a property in a notion table – Select used to be 3rd from the top
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we just reduced our session replay sdk bundle size from 75kb to 55kb
more here:
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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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@cgarciae88
I mean that’s kind of better because at least you don’t have to worry about unsafe user input
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Slides for the
#fstoconf15
edition of "Revisiting Front-end Performance" are up: Always glad to be in the 6 🇨🇦
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Realization: storing stuff in your home is just a tree problem. You don’t just lay out your possessions in a row and linearly scan them to find what you want. You put them in subtrees (closets) and further subtrees (bins) and basically I can’t find my Kindle can you help me?
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when we got to work bringing session replay to
@getsentry
, this is the dream we envisioned
super happy to see folks use it to connect the dots and ship better software
y'all take a pen, paper & write this down:
✅ never ever not even once ship to prod without Sentry
It's such an insane product. Look at this:
- got mail Error: some API issue, clicked
- Sentry freaking shows me a recording of the bug in the *UI side*
- I immediately can visually
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