It's hard to keep the internet promise

The internet has a particular way of making promises feel real. You start a blog, post an entry or two, and tell yourself this time you will keep at it. The medium makes consistency feel possible in a way that a private journal does not—because someone might actually be reading.

Then life intercedes. Deadlines compound. The blog sits quiet for three weeks, then six.

This was as true in 2007 as it is now. The platforms change; the pattern does not. What the pattern reveals is not laziness but something more structural: we systematically underestimate how much discipline it takes to hold space for learning in a career that constantly demands delivery.

The task list I kept then said something about what I believed mattered. A postgraduate program in IT project management from IIT. Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming—a commitment that few engineers actually complete, which makes it an interesting aspiration to keep on a list. Design patterns. Software architecture.

That last one was different. It was not a course or a book but a lifelong orientation—the kind of interest you cannot finish, only deepen. Architecture is not a destination; it is a lens. Once you start seeing systems through that lens, you cannot unsee them.

What is interesting about that list in retrospect is the gap between what can be checked off and what cannot. Courses end. Books have final pages. But the practice of thinking architecturally, or the habit of writing publicly, or the commitment to staying technically current—these have no completion criteria. They require showing up without the reward of a finish line.

The internet promise—to publish, to engage, to keep learning in public—is hard precisely because it is indefinite. You can always start tomorrow. Which means today rarely has the urgency it deserves.

The people who manage it are not the ones with more discipline. They are usually the ones who have made the activity small enough to survive the weeks when everything else is loud.