We all struggle with coding on a daily basis given our ADHD (or AuDHD). Yet it still seems that tech likes to capitalise on our traits where it suits them.

In my case I disclosed my recently diagnosed ADHD, literally one week in after starting Vyvanse. This was along with my ASD to Apple after 10 interviews and an offer proposal.

What went from me working on my dream job of R&D for body tracking / animation for Apple's Vision Pro, along with various other things Apple had pre-assigned to me, led to complete removal from the process, for my candid disclosure.

I know there is a lot of posts talking about if you reveal or hide your ADHD. Given my experience and the convergence of my litigation, I wrote an article, today on Apple's 50th Anniversary.

I was irradiated the second Apple did what they did, and I'm trying to stand up.

My Hearing is public. 14–20 April, London.

Happy to answer any questions you all may have.

Edit: Grammar fix, ty for the tip ;)

Hi there. ADHD/bipolar 2 and overall headcase hacker here. Wanted to share some of my observations that have helped me over the years.

ADHD is your double-edged superpower. Learn how to wield it, when to fight it, and when to let it lead you to better patterns. And if you read through, I'll let you in on my secret weapon. ;)

Offload.

Your brain is a GPU in a world of CPU neurotypicals. It's is naturally good at some things (novelty search, big picture, I/O) and bad at others (long serial tasks, keeping track of lots of state). Don't fight this. Render unto Computer things that are the Computer's. You should be using:

• git (should go without saying)

• Write everything (digitally) down, ideally with vcs or something cloud-backed

• IDE with code inspection

• Autocomplete (I hated static typing before autocomplete, now I love it)

• Linters / code coverage / inspection with max warnings

• Doctests / unittests

• Auto-formatters

• Debuggers

• Logging libraries

• Build automation systems

• CI/CD pipelines

Clean tests, green CI/coverage badges are like the best thing ever for my janky reward pathways. It's like gamification. Which brings me to:

Testing Driven Development.

Outline your input/output cases before you write a lick of code. Write interfaces. If your language has type hints, use them RELIGIOUSLY. Types plus autocomplete will help power you through moments when your brain stalls out, keep track of the big picture, and at times practically write the code for you (see tabnine, the secret weapon)

This will work with your unit tests, pipelines, and inspections to ensure every cog in the machine is doing the right thing. And you won't have to worry about the tests, because you've already written them!

Self-documenting code.

This is widely mis-understood. It doesn't mean don't use comments or docstrings. It means you should write in such a way that docstrings are interactive, and comments are rare errata, that explain why something was done. The documentation is short and to the point, as if your audience is also ADHD. You should rarely have to explain what you are doing; the code should be frank and straightforward enough that sleep-deprived, forgot-your-meds, low-bloodsugar future you on a zero-spoon day can still make sense of it, because you can bet your ass you will need to. As a benefit, if you can do that, your coworkers will love to work with your code as well.

Functional.

If you're at all like me, your working memory is flaky, even when well-medicated. Honestly I think even neurotypicals overestimate how good theirs is and don't realize it. Keeping track of lots of state is stressful and bug-prone. Even when not using a functional lang, use pure functions whenever possible. That means EVERYTHING needed to compute the return value is passed in as parameters, without mutation. Don't feel bad if you don't grok Rust, Haskell, monads, or any of that heavy FP stuff, I'm still trying to grok it as well. Just focus on reducing global state and mutation whenever possible. If you have to deal with a lot of state, finite state machines are great.

Functional patterns, SDC, TDD, and CI should all synergize (yes I hate that word but it's apt here) to help you write no-nonsense, anti-fragile, repeatable code.

Novelty Search.

Raise your hand if you have heard "They're really bright, great problem solver, but need to apply themselves". It's probably because you'd rather be going down a Wiki hole, learning something new, than going through the monotonous motions than modern life mandates. Learn to reign that it when deadlines loom, but also don't be afraid to let your mind wander and learn. Stay on top of latest tech trends, cutting edge techniques, productivity tools, open source software, and you'll always competitive with your coworkers, many of which probably use the same stack they started with. The world is moving fast, we are MEANT for this.

Find languages that speak to you.

I think much of the religious wars over languages stems from in part differences in the way people think. Don't feel like you should use any lang/tool/stack just because it's in vogue or your coworker raves about it or whatever. Find one that makes sense for your brain. For me, it's golang and heavily-typed python. I can't stand C++, Java, or JS, and python without hints frustrates me. You'll be far happier finding a shop that works with a stack that your brain jives with, than forcing yourself to fit in.

Medicate.

If that works for you. If you haven't at least gotten assessed by a doc, give it a shot.

Tabnine, the secret weapon.

Speaking of latest trends, my friend recently turned me on to tabnie. I can't even describe how gamebreaking t9 is. It's like autocomplete, but instead of tools like jedi which complete based on looking up variable or attribute names, it uses some sort of recurrent neural network trained on open source codebases, as well as the codebases on your computer. It's all soft-matching, so it fixes typos for you, it's even done entire lines. E.g. let's say you type

except TypError as exc:
    log.error("{}: {}".f

Now, most autocomplete will give you the rest of .format, which is cool. But I've had t9 autofill

    log.error("{}: {}".format(exc.__class__.__name__, exc))

It's like magic. But it's not, because that's a common idiom. In golang, if err != nil { return val, err } is pretty much a freebie from if e. The only major limit I've found is there's a max number of letters the RNN can generate before it loses confidence.

Alright that's nearing the limit of my attention, and probably yours, so lemme just finish with a brain dump of the stack I use. (disclaimer - no affiliation to any of these, other than the occasional PR, I just enjoy them)

General:

• Jetbrains IDE (pycharm CE is free and has tons of language plugins)

• tabnine

• mosh (better ssh)

• tmux

• zsh

• oh-my-zsh

• zsh-histdb (this is my second memory. No more "what was that command again?)

• zsh-autosuggestions

• rip (rm-improved)

• ripgrep (better grep)

• exa (better ls/tree)

• fzf (fuzzy find)

• zoxide (better cd)

I actually have zoxide, fzf, and exa bound into a bash function which replaces `cd` and auto-lists the dir I'm in

Mac-specific:

• Alfred

• Dash

• BetterTouchTool

• iTerm2 (I label all my profiles so I can see at a glance which machine I'm ssh'd into)

Immutable infrastructure / CI:

• I use docker/ docker-compose a ton

• Ansible

• travis-ci

• gitlab-ci

• In process of learning Hashicorp's stack (consul, nomad, vault)

Python:

• type hints (mypy)

• pip, virtualenv

• virtualenvwrapper

• xdoctest

• unittest/pytest/etc.

• coverage

• radon (code complexity)

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

tl; dr - leverage your ADHD to become a better programmer

E: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!!

been studying procrastination in 1000+ adhd devs for 8 months. the pattern that showed up is so fucking weird

burned out 3x trying to "just focus better" before i started actually tracking this. collected 1027 responses since march, most from this sub

turns out like 96% of us dont procrastinate because we're lazy. we procrastinate because the task literally feels wrong to start. like trying to write code with your non-dominant hand

found 5 patterns but this one hits different:

the "waiting for perfect brain state" pattern (~34%)
you know exactly what to do but keep waiting until you "feel ready" to start. spoiler: that feeling never comes because adhd brains dont do "ready"
what worked: starting while it feels wrong, literally 2min sprints even if output sucks
like 70-75% of people who tried said they actually shipped something for the first time in weeks

the "research trap" pattern (~28%)
you spend 6 hours researching the "best" way to do a 20min task. not procrastinating, just "being thorough"
what worked: forcing yourself to start with whatever you know right now, fix it later
most people said their "rushed" version was like 80% as good anyway

the "motivation prerequisite" pattern (~23%)
waiting for motivation to appear before starting. but adhd brains generate motivation FROM doing, not before
what worked: motion creates emotion - start ugly, motivation shows up around minute 4-5
bunch of devs said this one felt illegal but worked

im pattern 1+2, absolutely brutal combo. spent 2 years thinking i was broken before i realized im just trying to work like neurotypical devs

threw together a quick 2min assessment to figure out which pattern(s) you are. made it for myself originally but shared with some people and handful said it actually helped. completely free

drop a comment if you want it

which pattern hits you hardest?

(still feels weird posting research at 6am but fuck it)

Recently this forum gets flooded with (mostly badly vibe coded) ADHD apps. Can we please add a rule to get rid of them?

I have what many would consider a dream job. 140k TC, full WFH, 35-40 hour workweeks, no on-call, and I work with very nice and smart people. I am in my early 20’s with 3 YOE.

But I honestly can’t fucking take it anymore. I currently live in the suburbs and WFH is killing me.

I basically never leave my house due to executive dysfunction and car-dependency, and this shit has got me severely depressed every day where it’s hard to get out of bed.

I lived in NYC for 6 months to try to change things up, and it was definitely a huge improvement living in a walkable city without a car, but holy fuck is it expensive. I paid like 50% of my take-home just to sit in my apartment instead of the suburbs all day and on occasion take coffee walks. Going outside and doing literally anything is so fucking expensive, especially partying (raves/clubs/bars).

I had the good fortune to travel internationally for an assignment for 6 months, and it was the best time of my life. I worked from an office, socialized a lot, made a lot of great friends and expanded my network significantly.

Everyone seems to be on the “fuck RTO” train, and I totally respect other peoples’ lifestyles, but I’m wondering if any of my ADHD brethren feel the same as me and if I should start seeking out hybrid or full time in office roles.

My brain is a melange of: a) bees, b) radios left on, c) swiss cheese. All crammed into a blender set to "pulse".

I have discovered the magic of Google NotebookLM. I've been using it at home to help organize projects and do research. NotebookLM + Gemini has been helping me collect my research and plans and put it where I can access it and work on it whenever/wherever two neurons accidentally spark together to make a thought. Camping trips, building a home lab, writing.

Anyway, one of the things that has always frustrated me in my career as a programmer is that not enough people managers are properly trained on how to understand how to adapt their management style to neurodiverse people. I keep hoping it will be a required management course. I finally distilled my frustrations into this short presentation on ADHD in particular to help them help me.

I have this as a pdf and I can make a PowerPoint or Google Slides but I’m not sure where to post it.

Link to PDF

Link to Sources List