ADHD & Programming

Ever wonder what it's like to be a developer with ADHD? Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you what it's like for me.

Projects Galore

I am always making. Seriously.

It's one of the only activities that gives my brain the satisfying over-stimulation it needs. I'm actually very lucky that it manifests this way. It used to be that I play videogames all day. I still play a lot, but programming is just as fun for me.

I know what you're thinking.

Sure, whatever. Everyone here is making.

Let's see if I can convince you... Here are the projects I'm currently working on:

• Swapiverse: A decentralized book swapping platform
• WeWatch: A mobile app to find movies to watch
• An A/B testing SaaS

Here are personal projects I've finished over the last year and a half:

• Vim-Bujo: A minimalist task manager in vim
• Playlistify: Type in a sentence and get a spotify playlist that spells out your sentence
• 1984butfb: The first chapter of 1984, but Big Brother is find & replaced with facebook
• Easy Usernames: Check domain name and username availability across social medias (warning: not good lol)
• A tool to automate the social media meta tags for any new project I create
• Fungy: A videogame revolving around climate change
• Swing: A browser arcade game where you have to swing away from a black hole
• Kiwi: A cartoon about a young boy who becomes a pirate

And here are projects I've abandoned:

• NFT Hub: An online nft museum (NFTs are boring)
• Automated database diagraming using force-directed graph drawing algorithms (I got graphs to draw themselves, but never in a way that was actually practical for databases)

Maybe this is an embarassing moment for me and I'll come to realize that everyone is this prolific, but people seem shocked when I show them all this. I absolutely attribute it to my ADHD brain constantly wanting a new challenge. In this regard, ADHD has been a superpower for my learning and creativity.

Boring? No thanks.

Unfortunately, this also means that the once I'm satisifed with a project, I am over it and don't want to touch it anymore. And this can happen over the course of an hour, a day, or a year. I just get over it.

This clearly isn't helpful at work. It really does feel like suffering if I need to do anything I find boring. As you can imagine, a lot of things at work are boring. It could take me an entire day to do a 5 minute task if I'm having a rough day. I usually avoid taking meds and save it for when I really need it, and that's usually enough to save my career. I always get something done before it needs to get done, regardless of how painful it was to get there.

This also won't be sustainable if I want to build my own online businesses. If I start profitting over any of my projects, I can't just say "no thanks" when a customer has an issue. I'm not there yet, though. It'll be a good problem to have someday.

I can spend 6 hours programming but not 2 minutes washing the fork in my sink

Not much else to say about this. I'm going to go spend hours making my bed, thanks for reading.

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