The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Everyone knows your location (News)
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, February 3rd, 2025. Last week's freakout about DeepSeek subsided. after people realized that its $5.6 million price tag was just the GPU cost of the pre-training run. And the actual total cost is likely up in the billions, where we'd expect it to be. This week's Freakout is all about the tariff-induced trade war.
What will next week's Freakout be? Hang tight, friends. I'm sure the writers will come up with something. Okay, let's get into this week's developer news. Worth your attention. Everyone knows your location. After learning of a massive data leak that exposed 2,000 plus apps secretly collecting geolocation data without user consent,
Tim SH looked into the list and found three apps that he has installed on his iPhone in that list. That gave him an idea. Could he track himself down externally, as in to buy his geolocation data leaked by some application?
So he grabbed an old iPhone 11, restored it to factory defaults with a brand new Apple ID, set up Charles Proxy to record all traffic coming in and out, installed a single game, stack by catch app and logged all of his findings. The results are troubling, but not surprising.
He even made a flow chart of the data coursing its way through the network, finishing with quote, this is the worst thing about these data trades that happen constantly around the world. Each small part of it is, or at least seems legit. It's the bigger picture that makes them look ugly. comfortably monitor your internet traffic.
After a story like the last one, I figured you might want a quick and easy way to monitor your network traffic. SniffNet is a cross-platform app written in Rust that looks like a great free option. Here's what sets it apart. Quote, SniffNet is a technical tool, but at the same time, it strongly focuses on the overall user experience.
Most of the network analyzers out there are cumbersome to use, while one of SniffNet's cornerstones is to be usable with ease by everyone. What makes a good team? It's easy to know a bad team when you see one. Likewise, good teams are often evident. Most teams, however, are somewhere in the middle. So what actually makes a team good?
Kate Huston takes a crack at answering that by listing out attributes of good teams. Clarity of purpose, where people understand why the team exists, and defined work streams aligned with that purpose, where people understand what the team is doing and why, are where she starts. layer in good communication and connectedness, and Kate thinks you're off to a great start.
From there, it's all about fundamentals. Quote, good delivery fundamentals, the team delivering its purpose consistently and over time, good people fundamentals, that necessary ongoing maintenance work for any team, and good process fundamentals, the base level organization that facilitates team effectiveness. It's now time for Sponsored News. How coding AIs will support large-scale engineering.
This post is from Scott Dietzen, CEO of Augment Code. The TLDR? Large, long-lived software projects are essential for human endeavor, but profoundly hard to craft and evolve. Today's coding AI has come up well short of solving the real pain points of software engineering. Augment code is empowering teams to overcome these challenges from inspiration to software excellence easily and quickly.
End quote. His seven essential beliefs for delivering an AI for software engineering are well illustrated in the post. The seventh one will shock you. Just kidding. I hate when people do that. The seventh one is AI will actually increase demand for software engineers. Seven things I know after 25 years of dev.
Victor Shepilev, drawing on 25 years of coding experience and 10 years of war experience. Yes, actual war. Victor is a Ukrainian who serves in the armed forces. This post is a loose transcript of a keynote he gave at the Yuruko conference in September of 24. I'll give you the seven things, but definitely click through for some deep insights on each one. One, you outgrow every framework.
Two, patterns and methodologies fail. Three, scale only grows with time. Four, pay attention to stories. Five, the goals are truth and clarity. Six, this might be a lonely experience. And seven, never give up seeking truth. Writing a good design document.
I made a short plea for design documents saying, just give us a paragraph, please, while discussing documentation strategies on ChangeDog and Friends a couple weeks back. In this post, Grant Slatton does a much better job of discussing the topic because he actually tells you how to do it well. What's a design document?
Quote, a design document is a technical report that outlines the implementation strategy of a system in the context of trade-offs and constraints. End quote. Grant lays out your goal in writing, how to organize it, editing, and more. Then he drops a bunch of nice tips he's learned over the years, like use short paragraphs, use an appendix, etc. Very useful stuff.
That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, including Block Introduces Codename Goose, JavaScript Temporal Is Coming, and an expense tracker that lives in your terminal. Oh, and this is episode 130, so that means it's time once again for some Changelog++ shoutouts. Shoutout to our newest members, Miriam M.,
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