Happy Monday, Baltimore. I hope you had a great weekend. 

Today, we've got some news courtesy of the real estate services firm CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent Report. Baltimore landed at the #17 spot — a three-spot drop from last year's #14. 

Credit at least part of that decrease to the region's loss in total tech sector talent, as well as a drop in total office vacancy rates. Still, Baltimore remains an affordable and attractive alternative to higher-ranking but more prohibitively expensive cities and regions like San Francisco, Vancouver and DC metro. It has the fourth-highest average annual tech wages of any area in the United States while maintaining a 17.8% ratio of tech salary to apartment rent.

In other words, Baltimore may have slipped, but the things we know and perhaps love about it — its affordability, relative concentration of tech jobs, public sector strength and university talent generation pipelines among them — remain major assets. 

What do you think could help Baltimore boost its rankings? Check out this year's report and let us know your thoughts by responding to this email, then look for our full story on the report tomorrow.

— Technical.ly editor Sameer Rao (sameer@technical.ly)

P.S. Enjoy the below story from Technical.ly's Pittsburgh reporter, Atiya Irvin-Mitchell, about a cool hardware project. Know of a local technologist building their own technical masterpiece in their spare time? As always, send us an email with details. We'd love to know about it.