Scenes from last night's Claude Code meetup in Toronto

🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto #6 – the version where we just hang out – returns Tuesday, Feb 17th at Mascot Brewing 👇 RSVP below

At Modem we've gone all-in on database branching to accelerate our development – sanity testing migrations, making sure preview builds work end-to-end, and more. 👇 The folks at Neon thought we were pushing the envelope enough to merit writing about it. Worth a read! neon.com/blog/behind-...

Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

It was a good year: 1. Started a company (modem.dev), raised some money, hired a great team 2. Hit 1.9k GitHub stars on Counterscale (w/ @stordahl.dev) 2. Hosted DevtoolsTO 3x 4. Invested in some great 🇨🇦 startups 5. Visited Japan & Austria 6. Took some pics 📸

Blue Prince was my GOTY and I think nerdy programmer types here would enjoy it. Also it plays well on Linux via Steam's Proton compatibility layer.

"make a picture of a cool S" Nano Banana Pro vs ChatGPT vs Midjourney

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.

The soundtrack for deep, focused work

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)

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!

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

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.

i have been cooking 🧑‍🍳 github.com/benvinegar/c...

Got some new stickers made for Devtools Tronto tomorrow

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

🇨🇦 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

See you at the combination skate shop + punk show

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 🙏

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)

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!

I like how you can be miles away and it still pops

Less than 2 weeks! lu.ma/7revpsif

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.

Playing around w/ Midjourney to animate some pixel art scenes

📈 React package downloads/day are up almost 70% (!) since the start of 2025

I think I found the least maintained feature on @github.com

🆕 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.

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

doesn't matter how much time I spent here visiting still feels magical

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 ...

I don't even remember how my website is being served anymore, I push changes via Git and somehow it's updated 😅

IMO blogs aren't dead yet – with so many having switched to video, I think writing is due for a comeback

As a software developer, I've been thinking a lot right now about AI, change, and anxiety ... and wrote a blog post about it. It's also about my time working at a bookstore in the mid-2000s, and has a lot of programming book nostalgia. Hope it's mildly interesting. benv.ca/blog/posts/t...

Not a lot of cities where you can fit horses, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars into one shot.

IMO the "killer app" of 4K monitors is being able to take screenshots that aren't blurry. I have a nice Ultrawide that's 1440p and totally usable for everything *but* this and it's irritating.

Last year I decided to stop website analytics on @projectwallace.com mostly because of the $14/month price tag. Recently Counterscale by @benv.ca came on my radar and for a free product this is 💯

After a lot of testing + production validation, Counterscale v3.0.0 is out: In this version: * New CLI installer makes deploying/updating easy * More accurate visitor + bounce statistics * Back to being a single Cloudflare Worker again More notes and instructions here: github.com/benvinegar/c...

A clear indicator that quality of life has decreased under this President.

I've been trying to level up the Counterscale landing page in Figma. Thoughts? Does any of this messaging hit for you? (thanks @jeremymorrell.dev for providing a quote!)

I miss when the biggest news of the day was a guy getting his monkey jpeg stolen

Yesterday I wrote a detailed breakdown of an issue on GitHub, and wrote about 4 potential solutions and their pros/cons to see what people thought. First time I've seen someone ignore all that and just copy/paste it all into ChatGPT to get an answer.

Today is the day! After a decade of working on Sentry it's time for me to move on to new adventures. It's been a wild ride, and I'm taking a lot with me from this experience. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/3/31/le...

Discovered a useful AI coding use case: You can use Claude 3.7 to approximately "de-obfuscate" minified code. Useful for reverse-engineering scripts. Here's trying it out on Sentry's minified SDK (which is open source). I've gotten similar-looking results on source code w/o accompanying OSS too.

🇨🇦 Last year this post connected me to ~20 Canadian founders & software devs. I'm told those conversations were helpful; for one company, it led to raising a major funding round. It feels important to do it again. 👋 If you're here and building software tools and/or OSS products, I'd like to help.

When I applied for my first TN, my application was wrong. But the US customs agent let me enter as a tourist so I could fix it + reapply the same day. If there was a chance I'd be disappeared to a private prison instead, I'd have never applied at all. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

My new favourite Ottawa museum is the Diefenbunker. It's like visiting a real-life Fallout vault.

Next up: trying to let users upload a pic and it'll turn it into a classy black & white newspaper-style portrait using stable-diffusion-v1-5-img2img on @cloudflare-dev.bsky.social It's not going well

I added a theme picker with some pleasant-looking themes.