Ben Vinegar
Co-Founder at Accel
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Vinegar is a seasoned software leader and founder with nearly three decades of experience building high-scale web platforms, developer tools, and security-focused products. As co-founder of Modem and former VP Engineering at Sentry, he led teams shipping observability features like session replay and profiling while contributing hands-on to Sentry's JavaScript SDKs and documentation. His background spans early-stage product engineering (FreshBooks, Disqus), security/anti-bot systems at Shape Security, and bootstrapped startups he helped found, showing a blend of product intuition and deep technical execution. An active open-source contributor, he improved SDK extensibility and testing infrastructure for widely used Sentry projects, demonstrating attention to reliability and developer experience. Based in Toronto, he also makes seed investments through Accel, pairing operational expertise with early-stage thesis-building. A subtle throughline in his career is shipping production-grade telemetry and instrumentation that helps teams observe and debug complex distributed systems.
29 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Hon. B.Sc. Computer Science, Hon. B.Sc. Computer Science at University of Toronto
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (15)
error-handling10
javascript10
develop10
nodejs10
sdk10
documentation10
testing10
mochajs9
debug9
debugging9
eslint8
error-log7
error-handler7
crash-reports7
html4
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
getsentry/sentry-javascript
Mar 2015 - Mar 2022
Official Sentry SDKs for JavaScript
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:51 releases, 442 commits, 422 PRs in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the JavaScript SDK for Sentry, specifically in the areas of bug fixes and feature enhancements. Their work included improving string handling, enabling detailed logging of outbound request data, and preserving original console methods. Additionally, the user developed the mechanism to add custom transport mechanisms, allowing for the use of custom HTTP transports to send data. These changes suggest a developer focused on improving the core functionality, debugging capabilities, and extensibility of the Sentry SDK.
sentryerror-monitoringravenvuegreenhouse
getsentry/raven-node
Nov 2015 - Aug 2017
A standalone (Node.js) client for Sentry
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 releases, 36 commits, 37 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on maintaining and improving the testing infrastructure for the raven-node project. Their work included fixing existing tests to ensure compatibility with older Node.js versions. Furthermore, they added and updated linting rules and code formatting to improve code quality and maintainability. The user's contributions also involved refactoring existing tests and expanding test coverage.
js-clientjavascript-clientsentrynode-jsjavascript
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