The Strays
Some Links and Stuff (2025-08-10)
August 10, 2025
So I’ve got lots of links and lots of stuff, I hope you’re ready. I’m gonna try to make a little table of contents to quickly hop through everything.
Marimo rocks and you should try it
I managed to crank out another Baltimore data project: this one looks at who owns the vacant houses in the city. I chose Jupyter notebooks for an exploratory analysis of city employee salary data a couple years ago, and felt pretty meh about them.
- Version control would work but the diffs were pretty hard to read
- I had trouble reproducing other peoples’ Jupyter notebooks in the past
- They weren’t very fast
- The editor kept breaking on me
I won’t belabor the point, but I heard about Marimo on the Real Python podcast (I think? it may have been Changelog). I decided to give it a go.
First off, I installed it with uv (which I am still loving!) and added any dependencies
to my pyproject.toml file with a quick uv add. I really only needed like numpy and
duckdb or some such. The command line tool made it easy to open tutorials, new notebooks, and more.
Marimo is written in Python, so the diffs are easy to read and version control is more straightforward.
You can also read data straight from CSVs into Polars/Pandas dataframes or run SQL using DuckDB. The SQL cell exposes the results as dataframes that can be shared across the notebook. However, Marimo is clever! I accidentally named a variable in a one cell the same as a dataframe output from a SQL query in another cell. Marimo threw an error! I was being careless and it stopped me!
I ran into some issues on deploy, but I caused them myself for the most part by including the data sources as CSVs with my notebook files. I needed to peruse the documentation a bit to learn how to path my data sources correctly so I could read them into the notebook both in my local environment and on my deployed site. I chose to use their web assembly export feature. Here are some docs about including paths to data sources so hopefully my dear readers are spared some pain.
I’d highly recommend checking this out if you’re on the market for a new data analysis framework and you’re a Pythonista.
Some gripes but also some wisdom
I’ve seen many write about their exhaustion with the current GenAI bubble. I definitely share the lack of enthusiasm, and the link below leads to yet another causualty in the war on using your brain: training and mentoring. I certainly don’t want to live in a world where GenAI bots are left to train the “developers of the future”, so what are we to do? This one is long, but it’s well worth the read. The second one is me all day every day working in Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s tech industry. I don’t think Tech was ever the wonderful, meriotocratic field people made it out to be, but it sure ain’t now.
Reading about poverty is no fun, but articles like the one below I find very valuable because they treat poverty like the very solvable issue that it is. The People’s Policy Project has been doing great writing, analysis, and research on US social policy and the welfare state for years now. I’d also recommend Dr. Kathryn Edwards (@keds_economist) on most socials and her podcast, the Optimist Economy for more good economic policy talk and analysis.
A UCLA professor wrote this advice for assisting people learning to use computers nearly 30 years ago, but I’ll be damned if every piece on that page doesn’t hold true. Quick and well worth your time!
Real nerd stuff and things I want to try
I’ve been watching a lot of Kevin Powell’s videos to clean up the CSS on my site. The one below was the best explainer I’ve seen on building a sticky footer for your site. I.e. a footer that goes to the bottom of your broswers viewport even if you don’t have content that extends that far. Kevin provides a couple options depending on if you want to use flexbox, grid, or something else I think.
I elected to go with the flexbox solution for my sticky footer, but the <hr> dividers
I used in my HTML resume disappeared. I went a googlin’ and shockingly found myself
at the doorstep of Stack Overflow once again. I got not only a solution but a very cool
explanation, with links and everything! I love programmers. Thanks for all the help
over this years, Stack. I hope the LLMs take a bit longer to do you in.
I came across a really cool little independent research lab. One of the cofounders (at least I believe they are a cofounder) is none other than Martin Kleppmann of Designing Data Intensive Applications fame. Name of the lab is Ink & Switch. They wrote a conference paper on local-first software. They discuss use cases, the limits of cloud-based dominance we see now, and even walk us through a set of distributed systems algorithms called CRDTs that they think could help power these new local first softwares. The paper is pretty technical, but concrete and well-written.
I feel like I come across a ton of wacky, classic hacker-type stories where a coder just decided to poke at something to see if they could. These stories really keep the original hacker ethos alive. The one below tells a tale of a house full of nerds deciding to hack their WiFi-enabled washing machine.
Finally, I read a post about how a person’s company uses a slack channel for informal chatting, code assitance (aka rubber ducking), and other communication. They called it the “digital water cooler”. Might be something cool to try on my new team, especially with new members joining India and there being less working hour overlap.
New job and the state of hiring
I am a people manager now! Senior leadership told my boss that she needed to give up all but one of the teams she was managing (at her peak, she had 3). She was a great boss (we still work fairly closely) so I was pretty bummed at first because I had grown accustomed to our team dynamic. But she put in a recommendation for me to replace her, and as we had been talking about my career path, I decided now was the time to see if people management suited me. This seemed like the right time and the right team. So far…very busy! I like the technical training, mentoring, and working across teams. Lots of meetings though…
You win some, you lose some! But overall, it’s going pretty well. And my great team is still my great team.
This job announcement brings me to my final two links about hiring in tech. The first details the author’s most important values and aspects of a hiring process and which interview methods and types they find most effective and appropriate for said values. I pretty much agreed with everything in here. Living coding is helpful when done during a pair program. I don’t really think it’s the best way to evaluate candidates in a job interview. I just think you get too many false negatives. And I say this as someone who has been told I interview well, technical and non-technical. I don’t mean to brag, I say that to say: I’ve figured out how to survive this system, but it’s not very good and we should do better.