Old-school diner food, biscuit sandwiches worth going out of your way for, and more

Breakfast is more than a meal, it’s a state of mind. You can eat eggs, bacon, biscuit sandwiches, or pancakes at any time; breakfast can be the fuel you need to jump-start your day or the landing pad after a long night that’s bled into morning. (That’s why we’re so happy the old-school diner Beth’s is open late again.) You can have breakfast at a diner or even some bakeries; you can sit down and linger over coffee refills or grab a breakfast burrito for the car. It might not be the most important meal of the day, but it’s definitely the most fun, and Seattle has more than its share of spots where you can experience a great one.

In February 2025, we tweaked this map to provide more info on specific menu items and also got rid of a couple of places that aren’t really “breakfast restaurants”: Rachel’s Bagels and Burritos (great place but it’s a bagel bakery), and Temple Pastries (a cruffin isn’t breakfast, sorry!). We also added Bang Bang Cafe in Belltown, a New Mexican coffee shop and breakfast spot that serves some unique items.

Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailing seattle@eater.com.

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Harry Cheadle eats breakfast every day. His go-to diner order for about 10 years has been corned beef hash, and he thinks that the home fries are a yardstick by which you can judge an entire restaurant. (Bad home fries can ruin the whole plate.) He will always, when given the opportunity, upgrade from regular toast to a scone or some kind of biscuit. Speaking of, he’s been grateful that more good biscuit places have been opening throughout Seattle lately — when he was growing up here, if you asked for a biscuit you had no idea what you were going to get.

Vietnamese brews topped with salted cream, old-school espresso, and innovative iced drinks

A while back we were chatting with someone in the coffee world who told us how dumb and bad this map is. You can’t really make a single list of Seattle’s best or most important coffee shops because “coffee shop” can mean so many different things. Do you want someplace to chill on a laptop? Dark roast or light roast? Do you like your cafes to be well-lit gathering spaces a la Capitol Hill’s Bonito? Or do you want to get a great Americano to go at a casual counter like Fremot’s Milstead and Co.?

At some point you have to just throw up your hands. So this isn’t a definitive list. It’s more of a way to celebrate the variety of coffee experiences you can have all over the Seattle area, and this means more than just the quality of the espresso. Places like the Station in Beacon Hill have carved out neighborhood spaces for art, mutual aid, and activism. No matter what corner of Seattle you’re in, you’re usually just a short walk away from delicious coffee in a welcoming space.

New to this map as of March 2025: Burien Press and Bellevue’s Third Culture Coffee, because good coffee doesn’t end at the Seattle city limits.

Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailing seattle@eater.com.

Harry Cheadle is Eater’s Seattle-based editor and has spent a lot of time working out of cafes. His go-to order is an Americano or a drip, though for the purposes of doing this map he’ll branch out into seasonal drinks. And he has to admit there’s a lot of high-level work being done around town with house-made syrups and clever flavor combinations. That’s to say, you shouldn’t support independent coffee shops because they’re more “moral” than multinational chains, you should support them because they are serving better and more interesting drinks.

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The push towards digital transformation and cloud-native infrastructure is massive, yet organizations also need to maintain legacy capabilities. With this pressure comes the need to manage operations with the same rigor and automation we apply to infrastructure, coding, and security. Many organizations have embraced the ideas of everything in a pipeline and all things as code. Teams are successfully deploying applications and the underlying frameworks, but the actual operation of service delivery and assurance is often an afterthought or purely reactive.

PagerDuty fills this gap with Operations as Code.

Operations as Code extends the principles of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to operational procedures. It involves defining, managing, and executing operational tasks — such as defining escalation policies, orchestrations that link runbooks, automating diagnostics and standardizing incident workflows — using PagerDuty’s Terraform provider. This approach ensures that operational practices are standardized, version-controlled, and can be executed with minimal human intervention.

Full Service Ownership

One of the tenets PagerDuty has long subscribed to is Full Service Ownership – You build it, you run it, you own it. Operations as Code removes the dependency on centralized teams. As the need for speed increases, DevOps teams cannot be beholden to centralized ITSM or even PagerDuty admins to integrate new monitoring, enrich events, or create new runbooks.

Similarly, centralized ServiceNow teams spending expensive, specialized skills on monitoring integrations, event management, enrichment, and automation that can be managed via Operations as Code makes little economic sense. These teams, especially in large organizations, are already stretched thin and the backlog of work grows daily. Leveraging PagerDuty’s Terraform provider achieves the same goals while delivering better outcomes for everyone.

Leveraging Pipelines and Terraform for Operations

Terraform, traditionally used in IaC, is the lingua franca of DevOps. By writing Terraform configurations, teams can automate the provisioning and management of not only infrastructure, but also the components and workflows that ensure Operational Excellence. PagerDuty’s Terraform can build service definitions, configure users, teams, and roles, define escalation policies and schedules, build event correlation, orchestration, and runbooks for automated diagnostics.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) play a crucial role in Operations as Code. By integrating operational tasks into CI/CD pipelines, you can ensure that changes are tested, reviewed, and deployed in a controlled and automated manner. Instead of directly changing configurations via PagerDuty’s UI or API, pipelines allow for version control, standardization, and rollback if there are errors.

Quality gates are traditionally used for code reviews, automated testing, security checks, etc. For Operations as Code, they can ensure consistency of service standards, such as minimum 3 tier escalation policy and maximum times between escalations, minimum requirements for runbooks, minimum enrichment via orchestrations, etc. 

This creates a great foundation to increase operational maturity. It’s easy to start with basic templates and rules such as “never ship an app without a runbook”. You can leverage a quality gate to check that there is always a Terraform with a link to a Confluence document or knowledge base article. 

You can then grow over time, identifying “Winners and Sinners” applications to baseline current operational maturity. Templates can be standardized and reused by teams that may not be as mature. One customer using this model found that services that met at least 5 of their 7 operational standards had about 30% better MTTR than those that didn’t. This will eventually lead them to defining minimal operating standards and breaking builds for those teams and services that don’t meet expectations.

Benefits of Operations as Code

Organizations that deploy Operations as Code will see several benefits, many with immediate return on investment (ROI). 

Toil reduction is critical. Too much time is spent in “ClickOps”, and by shifting from manual configurations, more time and resources are freed up for customer-impacting work. You will also reduce operational risk by ensuring traceability of changes to configurations, version control, and reusable templates. Similarly, you can operationalize governance and compliance by leveraging parsers, quality gates, and approved templates, while leadership can define minimum acceptable standards and expected outcomes.

Developer experience is improved by reducing ramp time of new team members, reducing toil in keeping the lights on and shift break-fix work to junior team members, so senior staff can focus on reducing tech debt (or mining tech wealth, if you’re optimistic) to deliver great customer experiences.

Operational Excellence is improved by reducing the frequency, severity, and duration of outages by ensuring repeatable outcomes and reduced errors. You can shift away from tribal knowledge by giving senior people a simplified, repeatable method to record their innate knowledge, creating context for reuse by junior staff. 

Getting Started

Talk to your PagerDuty contact on how to get started.

We’ll start with success metrics and then identify the areas where we can get a fast start with automation and templates. Where could you immediately reduce risk and what outcomes could you influence with standardizing operations? 

We’ll look at the ability to start a Center of Excellence with the right enthusiasts and experts who can help with Q&A, become keepers of the templates, and help continuously improve automation and orchestration. 

We’ll start with simple but impactful areas, and then focus on continuous improvement where we regularly review and improve your processes based on feedback and metrics.

What’s Next?

Operations as Code offers the promise of consistency, efficiency, and reliability by standardizing how you build operational tasks. By leveraging PagerDuty’s Terraform provider with your  CI/CD pipelines, you can lead your teams in adopting this transformative approach. While challenges exist, they are readily surmountable with careful planning, execution, and continuous improvement especially if you’ve engaged your PagerDuty team. 

This simplified approach to Operations as Code can be a cornerstone of Operational Excellence allowing your teams to move from a world of toil and break-fix to automation-driven full service ownership that will better serve your teams, and most importantly, your customers.

To get hands on with this, sign up for a free trial today. 

The post Operations as Code: Operational Excellence with PagerDuty appeared first on PagerDuty.

“Second” or “B-side city” refers to a destination often less well-known than its bigger counterpart in the same region or country. However, in my travels, I have enjoyed visiting quite a few that deserve all the love and attention. Here is my list of favorite, attention-worthy destinations full of character and charm and with so much to explore!

Traverse City, Michigan

A pocket-sized city with a vibrant downtown located on a Great Lake. TC enjoys easy access to hundreds of wineries, farms, cheesemakers, and a national lakeshore. I was struck by feeling like a newbie discovering a place for the first time yet welcomed like I had lived there my entire life. 

Check out our Traverse City episode for more!

Brooklyn, New York

Okay, technically Brooklyn is a borough, but if it weren’t it would be the 4^th largest city in the United States. Manhattan gets all the travel love and is nowhere near as cool as Brooklyn is. I am totally biased.    

Check out our Brooklyn, NY episode for more!

Huntsville, Alabama

This Southern hidden gem has a lot of surprises. It’s where the most creative people mix with scientists and the mash-up is travel perfection. I was in Huntsville for my very first season of Places to Love, and 84 episodes later, it remains a favorite. 

Check out our Huntsville, AL episode for more!

Xi’an, China

Xi’an was the capital of China for 13 dynasties and the terminus of the Silk Road. The Terra Cotta Warriors are unlike anything you will see in your life and at night, the historic buildings put on a light show that is totally magical. 

Check out our Xi’an, China episode for more!

Lafayette, Louisiana

Home to Cajun country as well as Zydeco music, Lafayette is a low key but celebratory place where the local saying is “I’ve never met a stranger” and everyone’s a friend!

Check out our Lafayette, LA episode for more!

Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore has shaped American colonial history from the beginning, yet it has an unconventional quirkiness that ensures you have a great time. Follow in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass and enjoy a museum known for outsider art.  Do whatever it takes to meet a real Hon. 

Check out our Baltimore, ML episode for more!

Corning, New York

Home to the Main Street of our dreams, you would be forgiven to think of Corning as “cute”.  And yet its famous 175-year-old glass manufacturer has been the center of so many life-altering innovations. Luckily, it has a state-of-the-art museum where its story can be told. Corning is also a part of the glorious Finger Lakes Region, so you’ve got natural beauty and wine. 

Check out our Southern Finger Lakes episode for more!

Belfast, Ireland

A cultural center of Europe, from the best live music venues to its street art and murals against a backdrop of preserved Victorian architecture. Drive up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway for an Irish trip you’ll never forget. 

Check out our Belfast, Northern Ireland episode for more!

Madison, Wisconsin

A city consistently voted as one of the best places to live is ALWAYS a good sign. Set on two lakes, its overall vibe is part outdoorsy, part food and beverage obsessed. We’re talking about a Supper Club to act out your Mad Men dreams, a rare organic brewery, and don’t get me started on the cheese scene.

Check out our Madison, WI episode for more!

Portsmouth New Hampshire

A seaside city founded in the 1600s has become a beacon of small shops, restaurants, and the best music venues in New England. It’s got a ton of charm and gravitas. It’s packed in the summer but equally as enjoyable in the off season. 

Check out our New Hampshire Seacoast episode for more!

Vienna, Austria

The size of this city doesn’t scream “B side”, yet it’s often overlooked over other major European capitals like Paris, London, and Rome. It’s one of the greenest cities in Europe with a lot to offer. Enjoy Grand Palace tours and world-class museums, then swim in the Danube.  

Check out our Vienna, Austria episode for more!

The post Second Cities Worthy of All The Attention appeared first on Samantha Brown's Places to Love.

Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.

Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans’ data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.

Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: “National program director of the CHUM Group”) and TikTok.

Tags: 2025 Coup · Donald Trump · Elon Musk · Jamelle Bouie · politics · USA · video

I’ve spent the last six days using the iPhone 16e, and the experience has been a throwback. In many ways, the iPhone 16e both looks and feels like the modern-day progeny of the early Steve Jobs era iPhones. Early iPhones like the plastic 3G and 3GS, and the glass-back/metal-sides 4 and 4S were simpler offerings. Two colors, black and white. Single-lens inconspicuous cameras. The iPhone 16e feels like their descendent.

Let’s start with the camera. With just a single lens on the back, the iPhone 16e camera doesn’t just look less conspicuous compared to its dual- and triple-lens brethren, it feels less conspicuous. Especially for me, coming from several years of daily-driving an iPhone Pro model, the 16e feels strikingly smaller in hand and pocket because it lacks the entire “mesa” protrusion from which iPhone 16 and 16 Pro camera lenses themselves protrude.

Apple’s tech specs for iPhone thickness don’t include the camera lenses or camera mesas. Apple just measures and reports the thickness of the flat non-camera part of the phone. But those camera modules and lenses protrude quite a bit. Using a digital caliper, I measured the thickness of the three “levels” of the 16e, regular 16, and 16 Pro:

	Base	Mesa	Lens(es)
iPhone 16e	7.8mm	—	9.5mm
iPhone 16	7.8mm	9.6mm	11.3mm
iPhone 16 Pro	8.3mm	10.3mm	12.5mm

So not only does the 16e completely omit the mesa, but the thickness of the entire camera, from the lens to the front display, is less than the thickness of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro at their mesas, not even including their lenses.

Just look at this screenshot from Apple’s comparison page, showing all three side-by-side in their black color options:

The iPhone 16e looks like a phone with a tiny camera on the back. The iPhone 16 Pro looks like a camera that also happens to be a phone. You can really feel the difference in hand, too — not just the weight, but the balance.¹ You can feel that the 16 Pro’s extra camera hardware adds extra weight. Per Apple’s specs, the iPhone 16e weighs 167g; the 16 Pro 199g — a 16 percent difference. (Also take note of a clever touch: Apple’s default wallpapers for each phone subtly suggest how many camera lenses they have.)

The 16e camera lens is not flush with the back of the phone, but it protrudes so little (just 1.7mm by my measurement) that it harks back to when iPhone cameras first started jutting out from the back of the phones at all. The 16e still wobbles when laid on a tabletop, but dramatically less than a regular iPhone 16 or especially the iPhone 16 Pro, whose camera module seems downright bulbous in comparison. But the 16e’s 1.7mm camera lens protrusion is so minimal that, when put in a case, the phone does lay perfectly flat on a table, because the cases need no protective rim for the camera, because the 16e camera lens protudes less than the thickness of the cases. (Apple included two of its $39 Silicone Cases with my review kit, in blue and black. They’re fine, and feel exactly like Apple’s usual Silicone Cases.)

Because the “macro” mode on the recent regular and Pro iPhone models uses the 0.5× ultrawide camera, a secondary lens the 16e doesn’t have, the 16e doesn’t have a macro mode. Starting with the iPhone 13 Pro, macro mode has allowed iPhone Pros to focus on objects less than an inch away. But, because the 16e’s 1× camera has a smaller sensor and smaller lens than the 1× camera on more expensive iPhone models, it’s able to focus at shorter distances than those bigger and otherwise better 1× cameras. The 1× camera on an iPhone 16 Pro has a minimum focus distance of 24cm (~9.5 inches). The 1× camera on an iPhone 16e has a minimum focus distance of 12cm (~4.75 inches). Actual macro mode (on regular and Pro iPhone models) is better, but you don’t need it as much when the 16e’s lone camera can focus on objects at half the distance, just over 4 inches away, in its regular shooting mode.

The 16e’s inconspicuous camera comes with a price, of course: image quality. You can really see the difference in low light. The 16e camera is slower (resulting in blurry images with subjects in motion) and images are noisier. The difference is especially obvious when shooting in low light with Process Zero in Halide. It’s a fine camera though, for point-and-shoot purposes. For most people who might be considering the iPhone 16e, it’ll probably be the best camera they’ve ever owned. And there’s something to be said for the simplicity of just one lens, offering 1× and 2× fields of view. If you know what an ƒ-stop is, you probably shouldn’t buy an iPhone 16e. If you don’t know what an ƒ-stop is, you probably won’t notice any difference in camera quality from an iPhone 16 or even 16 Pro. It’s a perfect camera for anyone who just wants a decent camera.

What’s Missing: MagSafe, ProMotion, and Ultra Wideband (and, uh, the Other Ultra Wideband)

Peruse Apple’s comparison page, comparing the 16e to the 16 Pro and regular 16, and you’ll spot dozens of small differences. But the one omission that grabbed the most attention (and generated the most “WTF Apple?” reactions) is MagSafe. I own a bunch of MagSafe peripherals, and personally would never want to buy an iPhone without it. I have a dock at my desk (great with StandBy mode), a charger at my nightstand, and convenient doodads like this magnetic folding stand. One week into using the 16e as my main phone, and I still miss MagSafe as much as I did the first night.

But according to Apple representatives, most people in the 16e’s target audience exclusively charge their phones by plugging them into a charging cable. They tend not to use inductive charging at all, and when they do, they might not care that the 16e is stuck with a pokey 7.5W Qi charging speed, when recent more expensive iPhones charge via MagSafe at 15W or even 25W. For me, it’s not the high charging speed I miss most; it’s the snapping into place.² I think Apple knows the 16e’s intended audience better than I do. Daring Fireball readers aren’t in the 16e demographic; it’s the friends and family members of DF readers who are.

What features do typical low-end iPhone buyers care about? They want a phone that looks good, with a good display, a decent camera, and long battery life. Do they care that the 16e only supports Wi-Fi 6, not 7? No, because they have zero idea what Wi-Fi version numbers even mean. They just think Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi. Do they care about superspeed mmWave 5G networking from Verizon (a.k.a. “ultra wideband”)? No. They just want their cellular connection to be fast and strong. (My review unit from Apple came with a temporary eSIM on AT&T. Cellular connections were fast and strong all week. The only place where I noticed a weak signal was in a deeply suburban / borderline rural area while visiting family over the weekend; my wife’s iPhone 15 Pro Max lost its signal on Verizon at the same location. I have zero complaints about Apple’s C1 modem.)

The iPhone 16e also omits the other “ultra wideband”, the chip Apple uses for precise location detection — like tracking an AirPod to within a foot. Precision finding is super cool, and when you’re truly bedeviled by a lost item like a keychain, remarkably helpful. Ultra wideband has been included on all new iPhones other than the SE (and now 16e) since the iPhones 11 in 2019. From a nerd’s perspective, it really does seem like a curious omission from the 16e five years later. But how many people in your extended family know what “ultra wideband precision finding” is?

To date, only Apple’s iPhone Pro models have supported ProMotion — Apple’s marketing name for a display that features adaptive refresh rates that go up to 120 Hz and down to 1 Hz for the “Always On” display mode. Given that the regular iPhone 16 (and 16 Plus) don’t support ProMotion, there was zero chance the 16e would. There are mid-range Android phones with high-refresh-rate displays, but (a) I don’t think they’re better displays, all things considered, and (b) they’re mid-range Android phones. It’s like bragging about the refresh rate on the dashboard display in a Kia Sorento. The 16e display also sports a throwback notch in lieu of the fancier, more playful, and at times cleverly useful dynamic island.

The iPhone 16e targets the “I only care about the basics” iPhone buyer: the screen looks good, the camera is good but simple, the battery lasts a long time (the difference should be quite striking for anyone upgrading from a four- or five-year-old iPhone), it runs all their existing apps, and it charges fast when plugged into a USB cable. Those are the basics, and the basics are all that casual users care about. That it’s lighter in weight and physically smaller thanks to its minimally protruding single camera lens is gravy.

Pricing

The only aspect of the 16e garnering more discussion than its omission of MagSafe is its starting price of $600 for a 128 GB base model. “It should cost $100 less” say some people, who tend to be the same people who also strongly believe it should include MagSafe and a ProMotion display. Here’s Apple’s current iPhone lineup, plus the discontinued (but still available from some carriers) 3rd-generation SE:

iPhone	Chip	64 GB	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB
SE (3rd gen)	A15	$430	$480	$580	—	—
16e	A18	—	$600	$700	$900	—
15	A16	—	$700	$800	$1000	—
16	A18	—	$800	$900	$1100	—
16 Plus	A18	—	$900	$1000	$1200	—
16 Pro	A18 Pro	—	$1000	$1100	$1300	$1500
16 Pro Max	A18 Pro	—	—	$1200	$1400	$1600

That’s a tidy pricing matrix with $100 increments. The new 16e starting at $600 makes more sense than the old SE starting at just $430. $600 is clearly the next logical “rung” under the year-old iPhone 15’s $700 starting price. Complaining that Apple no longer makes a phone that’s priced in the $400-500 range is like complaining that BMW no longer makes any cars that cost less than $40,000. They’re Apple. It’s an iPhone. Of course it costs more than a no-name Android phone, or the 27th model down the ladder in Samsung’s sprawling product lineup. Anyone who wants to spend less than $600 for an iPhone can buy one from the flourishing pre-owned/refurbished market — just like buying a BMW for under $40,000.

The iPhone 16e is an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone. But they do want an iPhone, not just any “whatever” phone. A just plain iPhone, with a good screen, good enough (and simple) camera, and great battery life. I think Apple nailed that with the iPhone 16e.