DEV Community: Aman Malik

The Problem Isn’t That You Lack Discipline

Aman Malik — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:33:44 +0000

It’s that the thing you’re trying to avoid is still one tap away
Most people treat self-control like a personality trait.
If they keep opening the same sites, scrolling past midnight, or breaking a promise they made that morning, the story they tell themselves is simple:
I just need more willpower.
That story is incomplete.
Willpower is real. It also fluctuates. It is strongest after a good night of sleep, a clear plan, and a sense of purpose. It is weakest when you are tired, alone, bored, ashamed, or staring at a difficult problem at 1am.
Modern technology is not designed around that fact. It is designed around access.
The result is a mismatch: you are trying to make a hard decision in the exact environment that makes the wrong decision effortless.

The cycle almost everyone recognizes
You decide to stop.
You mean it. You feel clear. You may even feel a little proud of how serious you are this time.
Then an urge arrives.
For a few minutes, the earlier decision becomes distant. The plan becomes theoretical. The only thing that feels immediate is relief.
Afterwards, the original values return. You feel worse than before. You promise again.
If this sounds familiar, you are not uniquely broken. You are running a system that depends on being strong at the moment you are least likely to be strong.
That is not a character diagnosis. It is a design problem.

Why most blockers fail at the exact moment you need them
People usually start in the same place.
They install a browser extension.

They turn on Screen Time.

They download an app that says “Focus.”

They add a blocklist.
These tools can work — until they don’t.
The failure is often not technical. The filter may be fine. The list may be large. The app may be well built.
The failure is architectural.
A lot of blockers live inside the same environment they are trying to control. When the urge is strong, the person still has the keys:

switch browsers
open incognito
turn the extension off
disable Screen Time
switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data
reinstall the app
use another device

So the blocker is “effective” during calm hours and fragile during the hours that matter.
A tool that you can casually disable is not really a boundary. It is a suggestion.
Suggestions are useful when motivation is high. They are weak when motivation disappears.

A better question than “How do I resist this?”
A more useful question is:
How do I make the unwanted option harder to reach before the urge arrives?
That shift sounds small. It changes the whole strategy.
Instead of winning a debate with yourself twenty times a day, you move part of the decision to the setup stage.
This is the difference between:

“I will not look.”
“Looking now requires extra steps I do not have the patience for.”

The first depends on the mood of the moment.

The second depends on the environment.
Athletes do this. Writers do this. People who stop drinking often do this. They do not leave the temptation in arm’s reach and then praise themselves for being strong. They change the room.
The internet is just another room. Most of us never redesigned it.

Environment design beats moment-to-moment negotiation
Think in layers, not in slogans.
A single blocklist is one layer. One layer is easy to walk around. Several layers turn an impulse into a decision.
Here is a practical stack that does not require a new personality.

Separate the phone from the weakest hours The bedroom and the late-night couch are where a lot of systems collapse. Charge the phone outside the room. Use a cheap alarm clock. This one change removes a huge number of “I was already in bed with the screen in my hand” failures.
Reduce the number of doors Delete extra browsers. Remove the apps that reliably lead to the same place, even if they are not the destination itself. If five apps can get you there, you do not have a filter. You have a maze with five exits.
Move filtering lower in the stack Browser extensions filter at the edge. Network / DNS filtering happens earlier, when the device asks “where is this website?” That does not make access impossible. It makes casual access less automatic. You are no longer relying on one app to police every other app. Home Wi-Fi filtering alone is incomplete if the phone can simply switch to mobile data. The filter has to travel with the device, or the first bypass is already waiting.
Add a second person to the keys Self-control at 8am and self-control at 1am are not the same person. If a trusted friend or partner holds the Screen Time PIN, router password, or admin account, you have converted a private negotiation into a slower decision. That delay is the point. This is not punishment. It is admitting that you should not have to win the same argument every night.
Treat the urge as a 10-minute problem Most urges peak and fall if they are not fed. Leave the room. Stand up. Walk. Do anything that is incompatible with staying in the same chair with the same screen. You do not need a perfect spiritual or psychological state. You need to survive the next ten minutes without opening the door.

Relapse is information, not an identity
A broken streak does not prove that the previous decision was fake.
It usually proves that one door was still too easy.
After a slip, the useful move is not a three-hour speech to yourself. The useful move is:

Reset the same day.
Name the specific conditions: time, place, app, mood.
Close that one door.
Keep the rest of the system.

Shame without a change in environment tends to recreate the same night.
Hope without a change in environment tends to recreate the same week.
The point is not to become someone who never feels an urge. The point is to stop giving the urge a frictionless path.

What this is not
This is not a claim that tools replace therapy, community, faith, or professional help.
It is not a claim that any system is impossible to bypass.
It is not a claim that technology is the whole solution.
A filter cannot give you a life. It can remove some of the easiest ways to abandon the life you already said you wanted.
That is a narrower promise. It is also a more honest one.

The real upgrade
The upgrade is not a better pep talk.
The upgrade is this idea:
Stop asking your future tired self to be the hero of the story.

Build a room where the hero is needed less often.
Willpower can still matter. It just should not be the only layer between you and a thing you have already decided you do not want.
If you change nothing else, change this: stop leaving the door unlocked and then calling it a test of character.
Change the door.

I built a content blocker because I understood the code too well to be fooled by weak ones

Aman Malik — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:37:52 +0000

Here's the uncomfortable thing about being a developer and trying to block your own internet access.

You know exactly how every solution works. And therefore exactly how to break it.

Browser extension? I know it's just a manifest.json with a declarativeNetRequest rule. I can disable it in the chrome://extensions page in 4 seconds.

Hosts file blocker? I literally edit hosts files for local development. I can undo it in one terminal command.

Screen Time? I know it only hooks into Safari's WKWebView. Chrome doesn't use WKWebView. It bypasses it completely.

Router DNS? I know how to change my device's DNS settings. Takes 10 seconds on any OS.

Every consumer-grade blocker I tried, I broke within 48 hours. Not because I was trying to — because understanding the implementation made bypassing it obvious.

So I went to the one layer I couldn't easily circumvent myself.

DNS filtering via a VPN tunnel

The architecture that actually held:

All DNS queries from the device route through a WireGuard-based VPN tunnel to a filtering gateway. The gateway (Cloudflare Zero Trust in my case) evaluates every query against a blocklist before resolving. Blocked domains return NXDOMAIN or a block page IP.

The key properties that make this hard to bypass:

The VPN tunnel overrides system DNS — changing DNS settings in network preferences does nothing because the tunnel intercepts before the OS resolver gets involved
Works on every network — WiFi, cellular, hotspot. Not tied to home router
Catches every app simultaneously — not just one browser, because every DNS query goes through the tunnel regardless of which process made it
"Anonymizer/VPN" category blocks VPN apps — the bypass tool is itself blocked
VPN lockdown mode on Android kills all internet if the tunnel is removed — no tunnel, no internet

The part that required the most thought: removing my own admin access

The technical layer was actually the easy part. The harder problem was that I still had the admin credentials. I could log into the dashboard and change rules anytime.

The solution: Guardian Mode. A trusted person holds the dashboard credentials or must approve any rule changes. I can't modify my own filter without their explicit approval.

This is a commitment device at the infrastructure level. You're not relying on willpower — you're architecturally removing the ability to make a bad decision in a weak moment.

The stack if you want to replicate this

Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway (free tier covers this)
Cloudflare WARP client on device
Gateway policies using wirefilter expressions for category and domain blocking
A second Cloudflare account or trusted person holding admin access
Android VPN lockdown mode enabled (Settings → Network → VPN → lockdown)
Screen Time on iOS to prevent WARP app deletion

I eventually wrapped all of this into a product — noori.fun — because the raw Cloudflare setup takes 2-3 hours and requires understanding Zero Trust concepts that most people don't have. The product handles all the CF configuration automatically and adds the Guardian Mode, tamper alerts, and family management on top.

But the architecture is fully replicable if you want to DIY it. Happy to answer questions on the Cloudflare Zero Trust setup specifically — wirefilter expression syntax, policy ordering, split tunnel config, any of it.

Why Browser Blockers Fail Parents (And What I Learned Building a Better One)

Aman Malik — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:12:26 +0000

The Internet Isn't Raising Our Children. Its Algorithms Are.

A child doesn't wake up one morning and decide to search for harmful content.

Most of the time, it starts with something completely innocent.
A few YouTube Shorts. A funny Instagram Reel. A random recommendation. One click becomes another, and before long the algorithm is deciding what they see next.
That's the part many parents underestimate.

The internet today isn't just a collection of websites - it's a recommendation engine.
Its goal is to keep us engaged for as long as possible, not to protect our values.
As adults, many of us struggle with this ourselves.
We open our phones to reply to a message and end up scrolling for an hour. We tell ourselves, "Just five minutes," and somehow it's midnight.
If it's difficult for adults, imagine what it's like for a child.

Technology Should Protect, Not Tempt

For years, online safety has mostly meant browser extensions or parental control apps that are easy to disable or bypass.
The problem isn't that these tools are useless.
The problem is that they're often too complicated for non-technical families, or too easy to turn off when temptation appears.
Protection should be simple.
It should work quietly in the background without requiring parents to constantly monitor every device.

Why I Started Building NoorI

I didn't start building NoorI because I wanted another startup.
I built it because I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to stay focused and avoid harmful content in today's internet.
I wanted something that would make the better choice the easier choice.
Instead of relying on willpower every day, I wanted an environment that naturally reduced exposure to harmful content.

That idea eventually became NoorI - a simple way to help individuals and families create a safer online environment using network-level filtering.

A Better Digital Environment
No technology can replace good parenting, strong values, or self-discipline.
But good technology can support them.
Just as we lock our front doors to reduce unnecessary risks, we should also think about creating healthier digital environments for ourselves and our families.
The goal isn't to disconnect from the internet.
The goal is to use it intentionally - without letting algorithms decide who we become.
If we can make the online world a little safer for ourselves and the next generation, that's a step worth taking.

Check Out: NoorI 's guide that can help you setup your devices.

How to block PORN in my all devices?

Aman Malik — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:24:20 +0000

🚀 Launch Day!

Today I launched NoorI on Product Hunt.

It started as a personal project after realizing that willpower alone wasn't enough to avoid endless distractions online.

If you'd like to support an independent developer, I'd truly appreciate you checking it out and leaving your honest feedback.

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/noori?launch=noori