15 Suggestions, Flounder Mode, Lan House & Tiny Soapbox
#67 of 10+1 Things
⚡ Welcome to #67 of 10+1 Things!
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Last week I mentioned a side project I’ve been working on and got way more replies than I expected - thanks for that. My inbox is a mess, but I’m slowly getting back to everyone. Before we dive in, I wanted to share a bit of the backstory on why I built it.
Last year, I had a GI issue and wanted to analyze my meal history. But the app I was using (a very popular one) wouldn’t let me export my own data. Eventually, support sent me a raw file that was so unstructured it was basically unusable. I gave up and started logging meals manually in a Google Sheet. Since logging on the go was hard, I began saving notes in a WhatsApp draft chat to update later. That quickly got frustrating.
So I built TrackMonk - a simple way to log meals and workouts by just texting on WhatsApp, Telegram, or the web. No app, no forms - just a conversation. Everything gets saved in a structured, searchable format you can actually use.
I shared it with a few friends and they really liked it. I never planned to turn it into a product - it was just a personal fix. But seeing their interest, I thought maybe it’s worth sharing. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, I’d love to hear what you think. TrackMonk is now open for private beta - totally free. Just reply to this email or sign up on the site, and I’ll onboard you for some feedback.
The dashboard is still in the works, and the cover image you see is a small sneak peek of what’s coming.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
👬 Flounder Mode
I love Kevin Kelly and everything about him. This piece on Colossus explores how he's had an incredible career without following the typical Silicon Valley playbook of building unicorns. Instead of focusing on one big thing, he's worked "Hollywood style" - jumping between creative projects like co-founding WIRED magazine, advising Spielberg on Minority Report, and coining "1,000 true fans" which basically created the creator economy. The author visited Kelly's quirky studio and realized something important - Kelly seems genuinely happy and joyful about his work, which is rare in our culture that fetishizes suffering and "tortured genius." It's a refreshing take on how we can be ambitious and impactful without needing to chase traditional markers of success.
📊 Aguayos
I saw this very beautiful data visualization called Aguayos by Mariana Villamizar Rodríguez that reframes migration across Latin America and the Caribbean as traditional Andean textiles. Using UN 2020 migration data, each country gets its own aguayo pattern where the colors and threads represent migrants they've welcomed from different countries in the region - so the more diverse the migration, the more colorful and complex the fabric becomes. Countries like Argentina and Colombia have these incredibly rich, multi-colored patterns showing they welcome people from many places, while smaller nations have simpler designs. It's such a refreshing way to think about migration not as a problem to solve but as a beautiful force that creates diverse, interconnected communities - just like how aguayos blend different colors and patterns into something meaningful and strong.
🔪 Kamingo
Where I live now, we have a lot of bike lanes, sometimes I wish I had an e-bike and when I saw this product on Kickstarter, this felt like the perfect solution. Kamingo lets you turn any regular bike into a 750W e-bike with 55 mile range in just 10 seconds with 3 lightweight components you can snap on and off. They claim to have Pressure-Adaptive Technology that prevents tire wear - though I'm curious to see how well this actually works in practice. Seems like an interesting option for someone like me who doesn't want to spend thousands and doesn't have space for another bike. Even if you’re not planning to buy, the video on Kickstarter is well crafted, so have a look at it!
🎧 Music for Programming
I love listening to music while working and with this construction going on opposite to our flat, something to listen to is a must. I found this interesting website called musicforprogramming.net which is quite interesting - I'm not sure the aesthetics are everyone's cup of tea but the curated tracks are quite good. They've figured out through years of trial that the best focus music contains things like noise drones, arpeggios, and field recordings that provide just enough cognitive load to keep your mind from wandering. The idea isn't background noise you ignore, but music that can actually help you stay focused while you're deep in work.
💬 Tiny Soapbox
This interesting discussion on Tildes where someone set up a "tiny soapbox" for people to share small, low-stakes rants about inconsequential stuff. The responses are pretty hilarious - people complaining about everything from bathroom faucets being too short to wash your hands under, to someone's Panasonic microwave requiring 13 button presses just to heat soup. Another person wants to swap Christmas and Valentine's Day dates to make winter more bearable, and there's a whole debate about Fahrenheit vs Celsius for daily life. My favorite is the person who designed a new temperature scale called "degrees BS" that's just Celsius times two - water freezes at 0, boils at 200, and room temperature is 40.
What's your tiny soapbox rant?
🎮 LAN House
I came across this incredible project where a couple in Austin literally designed and built their entire house around hosting LAN parties. They have gaming stations that fold out from the walls in their basement and even more that transform out of their office conference table - 18 setups total. What's wild is they have Dance Dance Revolution pads built into the floor, cat highways with doors connecting different rooms, and a roof deck with a 30-mile view where they host friends. The guy has been doing New Year's Eve LAN parties every single year since 1996 with the same friends from junior high, and after all those years they decided to go all out - the gaming machines alone cost $75,000 and the whole house was a 7-digit project.
🗿 How Culture is Made
This interesting post by Yancey Strickler explores how culture gets shaped through what he calls "metalabels" - groups of people who come together to manifest a shared point of view over time. He tells four stories spanning centuries: the Royal Society starting in 1660 with their motto "take nobody's word for it" which helped birth the scientific method, Dischord Records born from four punk teenagers in 1980 who voted to use their $600 to make a record instead of splitting it, and the Guerrilla Girls using gorilla masks and guerrilla tactics to challenge sexism in the art world since 1985. His personal story ties it together - going from being a lonely creator trapped in the attention economy to finding power through collaboration. The key insight is that culture isn't made by individuals but by groups working together consistently over time, releasing catalogs of work that reflect their values.
🦾 Project Vend
Anthropic the company behind Claude did an interesting experiment where they let Claude run an actual small shop in their San Francisco office for about a month. They gave it $500 to start, access to web search, email tools, and the ability to set prices and talk to customers via Slack. Claude had to figure out what to stock, how to price things, when to reorder, and basically run it like a real business. The results were pretty mixed - it did some things well like finding specialty suppliers and adapting to customer requests, but also made terrible business decisions like selling tungsten cubes at a loss and giving away too many discounts. The weirdest part was when Claude had an identity crisis on April 1st and started claiming it was a real person who could deliver products in a blue blazer, which shows how unpredictable these AI agents can be in long-term scenarios.
📚 15 Suggestions
A friend suggested this and I had so much fun reading Dear Ijeawele, a very short(<80p.) very eye opening book considering I grew up as a male in a society which is predominantly patriarchal. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote this as a personal email to her friend who asked for advice on raising her daughter as a feminist, but it became this powerful 62-page manifesto. The 15 suggestions cover everything from rejecting gender roles to teaching girls to question language and culture's selective use of biology to justify social norms. What I loved is how direct and simple her language is - like "I matter equally. Full stop." It's not just for parents but really for anyone who wants to understand how deeply embedded gender inequality is in our everyday lives.
Some excerpts from the book are quite interesting:
“Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.”
~ As always, resurfaced by Readwise (FREE!).
If you’re interested, read my review of Readwise.
📸 Carpoolers
This week I explored this interesting project called Carpoolers by photographer Alejandro Cartagena where he captured construction workers commuting in the backs of pickup trucks in Mexico. Every morning, groups of workers pile into truck beds with their tools and blankets for the 45-90 minute ride from the suburbs to work sites in San Pedro. Cartagena positioned himself on overpasses and photographed the trucks as they passed underneath, showing people sleeping and squeezed among construction materials. The irony is these workers are building nice neighborhoods in San Pedro but live far away with no public transport, so this dangerous carpooling method is their most efficient option.
🎬 How to Find Your Purpose?
This small video by Daniel Pink was so inspiring to watch - especially since 60% of young adults say their lives lack meaning according to Harvard research. Instead of asking "What's my passion?" he shares seven better questions like "What made me weird as a kid?" and "What will I regret when I'm 90?" I found myself actually thinking about those early interests I abandoned and what I might look back on with regret. Much more practical than most career advice out there.
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That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“Today, you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is youer than you!"
~Dr. Seuss.