march 2026

🥖 just do it from scratch! + my internet journey 🧑‍💻

Hello!

from scratch

This is what I want to do, this is what I want to watch, this is what I want to cook.

A theme of this month has been doing things from scratch.

It started with me signing up for a subscription box of produce that gets delivered every week. The company — Odd Bunch — uses produce that would’ve been discarded and ships it to people locally.

What’s fun is that the produce I get is different every week. There’s usually a veggie in there that I’ve never cooked before (or haven’t in a long time).

It means I’m forced to think about how to cook this new stuff into a meal instead of doing my default prep with my default veggies.

It breaks me out of the monotony really. Perhaps the randomness of new veggies is what will make me a better cook.

I’m also making the following food from scratch instead of buying it:

• sandwich bread

• hummus

• mayonnaise

• granola

• hamburger buns (once)

manual consumption

In a sort of similar way, I’ve found myself behaving differently with my phone.

I’ve been drifting toward consuming things more intentionally. This means:

• scrolling through my YouTube subscription tab instead of the recommended page

• looking through saved albums on Spotify instead of my Discover Weekly or Daylist

This can be referred to as “avoiding the Home page”.

It’s not like I haven’t wanted to start doing this earlier — I’ve been trying to distance myself from recommendation algorithms for what feels like years.

I think it took hold because I realized that I actually enjoy the things I choose to consume.

Here are two examples:

• I discovered the podcast “The Rest is Politics” by searching “iran war podcast” on YouTube¹

• I found Tourist’s new album on Spotify by scrolling through my saved artists list

In both cases, I found the content instead of relying on recommendations.

To be fair, the Home page shows me good stuff too. I think there’s a lot of unique, special inspiration on the internet that I derive value from — and wouldn’t have found by myself.

The problem for me is that easy access to an infinite scrollable feed (especially on my phone) is a fraught, treacherous thing. I get addicted easily and lose my own thoughts in the process.

Anyways, even though I’m realizing that the algorithm isn’t always better than my own free will, I can also acknowledge that it’s not all bad either. Everything is a bit grey.

thank you to Ashley for this picture

on pressure

my job has never failed to exert pressure. in fact, few things in my life have been as consistent.

i don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing. it gives me the motivation to get better. it’s easier to learn when there’s some accountability.

i think pressure is good for a lot of things:

• a band might feel pressure to prepare for a performance

• an athlete might feel pressure to train for a race

• i might feel pressure to cook something good for a dinner party

that doesn’t mean the pressure is wrong — it helps!

but it also distracts.

pressure means there isn’t as much time to be curious. it bumps all the other stuff down the priority list.

kahvi on the internet

I created my Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2012, when I was 14 years old. I created my blog (kahvipatel.com) a couple years later, when I was 16.

I’ve been reflecting on how each of these places has changed.

beginning (2012-2016)

This is what my blog looked like when I first started:

Back then, I was just excited to create stuff that I could put online. Designing the website was rewarding — it felt like a natural evolution after spending a lot of time in Illustrator.

I enjoyed the writing part too. I wrote about my future career, my hair length and many other things. It felt very cool to “publish”² that work.

At the time, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were way more active. I would post almost daily, usually directed towards friends or classmates.

university (2016-2020)

Once I got to university, the blog became a vessel for me to learn new web technologies. I rebuilt my blog to learn about projects like React and Typescript. I used it to get my first co-op.

At the same time, social media was undergoing a shift in the culture. I think it started with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and movies like The Social Dilemma.

Regardless of how it happened, I started to trust Facebook less and stopped posting as much. This was also a trend among my friends.

career (2021-2026)

When I started working full-time, I was put on a team whose focus was building products for the web. This forced me to think more about the calculus of websites like Facebook: Your free consumption comes at the cost of being tracked.

That made it harder for me to justify uploading things to a platform that I didn’t even trust in the first place.

It made it easier to focus on my blog where the incentives were much simpler. I own the content I create there. That’s about when I decided to start this newsletter.

now

Throughout their existence, my website and this newsletter haven’t been well known among my friends. The updates I make often go unnoticed, and things I say here have less reach than they would on a site like Facebook or Instagram.

To me, it makes them feel like a more intimate, private space — one that people must choose to be in. Selfishly, I wish more parts of the internet were like this.

Or like the front page of Hacker News. Just a list of links that get upvoted.

misc

As usual, here’s a handful of unrelated things from this month:

• I caught a crab with Mason:

  

• Saw this lede on twitter

• This chart is interesting

  

• I want to try building this chair³

  

Finally, here’s me and Penny (courtesy of Ashley ♥️):

See you next week!

1. Yes, I realize this is a weird thing to search

2. No one really looks at the blog, so publish is a bit of a stretch here. Also footnotes are fun!

3. Assuming I find somewhere to put it 🤔