25 #

07 November 2025

In theory, this will be the only week with two week link posts, since the first was an anomaly to kick off the month. Without further ado, some things from around the web, from my eyes to yours.

Like many people I know, November 5 was a rare moment of hope this year, as Democrats had wide electoral success in many places.In Seattle, we are still anxiously waiting to see if Katie Wilson can surge past Bruce Harrell in our mayoral race. Anil Dash—who I’ve been reading off and on for literally decades and who served in a technology role in Obama’s administration—wrote a great reflection on Momdani’s win in New York, aptly titled “Turn the volume up”. A point that more folks in the Democrat establishment still need to internalize after all these years:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You have to start with the principle. You must have a politics that believes in something. You can’t win unless you know what you’re fighting for.

Speaking of New York: a school phone ban has made lunch loud again. You love to see—and hear—it.

This year, I’ve somewhat “rediscovered” baseball by becoming a fair-weather Mariners fan as they aaaalmost made it to the world series. What really kicked it in to gear though was attending my first live game in years, one in which they clinched their division for the first time in 25 years and Cal Raleigh hit home runs number 59 and 60. Exciting times! On a writing retreat recently, my partner and I stayed up to watch the 15-inning thriller that saw them defeat the Tigers to advance to the ALCS. It turns out: baseball is full of suspense and high drama. While I didn’t watch the 18-inning game 3 of this year’s world series,We did catch the last few—extra!—innings of game 7. More exciting baseball. I loved this story about the joy of staying up way too late to watch it.

On the work side of things, I’ve been slowly switching to using uv for new Python projects instead of (mini-)conda. Why? It’s the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade.

This profile of Brent Barghahn—founder/owner of Avant Climbing Innovations—was worth reading. Although I’m not the target audience for a lot of Avant’s products, seeing as I don’t rope solo, I’ve bought several of their multipitch pouches for myself and friends; the included phone leash on its own is a game-changer. I also do appreciate the general satisfaction of highly specialized gear that perfectly fills a niche for people at the cutting edge of things and am glad to hear that this focus is bringing him success.