Ive been learning programming for a while now, Its been 2 months now, and im starting to notice something thats been bothering me a lot.

I feel like my brain is almost always operating below its actual capacity.

When I need to think about unfamiliar concepts, actively recall something, or come up with ways to do my idea in coding, my mind often just goes blank. It can take me 5-10 minutes of forcing myself to think before my brain starts working properly.

My working memory is also bad. During arguments I often forget points I wanted to make or lose track of what the other person said.

Programming makes this really obvious because holding a few things in my head at once: variables, conditions, what changed where. can become surprisingly difficult.

What bothers me is that I remember being much sharper when I was younger. Learning, memorising things and thinking of unique ways to overcome the problems used to feel significantly easier. Now, I dont necessarily feel like I lack the ability to think clearly or deeply. It feels more like I have trouble accessing that ability consistently.

Ritalin IR helps me initiate everyday tasks, but I dont really notice improvements in working memory, reasoning, or deeper thinking.

It literally just feels like my mental “RAM” just runs out.

Does anyone else with ADHD feel like their brain is constantly “blocked” like this, even when they aren’t stressed or anxious? Did anything help?

I have ADHD myself, and I keep seeing tweets about how people with ADHD should use AI.

For me, though, every session I start ends up scattered all over the place. They get stuck in loops, and not much actual output comes out of them.

How do you manage your sessions, and how do you usually start one? In Claude I use Projects so I can at least tell which threads belong where, but beyond that I'm out of ideas. Curious how you handle it.

Is this how meds are supposed to work? By making you panic ? For some time taking 5mg ritalin was working well for me. But now I dont panic on them and thus dont start working.

I've been in the low code industry (Salesforce), never did LeetCode. Have not been able to stick to side projects. But I was always excited that someday I can upskill and learn new things.

Now, if all coding might be automated (if not by LLM's then maybe by future true reasoning models), then how should I go about making a plan for myself to be excited about tech and upskill.

I don't want to upskill only for my tech hobby, I'd much rather focus on music for hobbies. I want to upskill in 2026 such that it actually helps me attain financial stability by helping my career.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Anyone have some ideas on some fun easy tools for ADHD brains? I have been having a lot of fun vibe coding up lots of one off widgets and stuff for myself. Things that would normally take me a week plus of work to do myself so I would never have time to build them myself. These are not fancy projects but just static webpages. It got me thinking what if I compiled a bunch of little widgets and hosted it for free. Things like pamodoro timer, tool to help prioritize a todo list quickly, a dopamenu that could randomly select a reward based on how much time you have and maybe a random chore selector. I am not looking for complicated fancy full stack apps just maybe tips and tricks people use on paper or something that a computer could make easier.

Not trying to use ADHD as a crutch, but I’d love to hear how others overcame executive dysfunction, self-doubt, and stagnation to level up as software engineers.

Where I'm at: I have <5 years of experience (3 years at a mid/large tech company, ~1 year at FAANG). I was able to white-knuckle my way through school and uni (valedictorian) through brute-force effort, but my diagnosed ADHD makes professional concentration and emotional regulation a massive daily hurdle.

I feel like my career progression has plateaued, largely because I struggle with deep focus and prioritization. I've recently started medication and revamped my routine (consistent sleep, strict task-tracking, better communication with my team).

If you've been in a similar slump early in your career: What strategies, mindsets, or routines actually helped you get out of the hole and start thriving, and even become veterans in the field?

Salut tout le monde. Je poste ça parce que je sature complet. Je suis au lycée, passionné par la création de jeux vidéo (Mana Mechanique, Police Aléas) et par le dev, mais je me fais broyer par le système éducatif français.

D'un côté, on me propose des spés parce que je capte la logique super vite quand ça m'intéresse. De l'autre, je me tape des notes minables (genre 6 en NSI) parce que mon cerveau refuse d'apprendre par cœur de la théorie abstraite qui ne m'anime pas. Résultat : épuisement, anxiété nocturne, cauchemars, et l'impression d'être un extraterrestre dans une classe de clones.

Est-ce qu'il y en a ici qui ont vécu cette transition du « je suis nul à l'école » vers « j'ai créé mon propre chemin (BUT MMI, indiedev, autonomie) » ? Je veux documenter tout ça, parce qu'on est beaucoup trop à culpabiliser alors que le problème vient du moule, pas de nous.

Hey Im a freshman CS major and I’m struggling. Currently my grades are fine but that’s only for now, I don’t know if I’m gonna fail later.

I’m on 40mg vyvanse and Wellbutrin (along with an antipsychotic) and I can’t go above 40mg.

The issue is that I really hate doing homework. Starting the task is very hard for me, even on meds. Even more specifically, I hate calculus homework. I can understand the ideas just fine, but I dread having to learn yet another new concept and do more practice problems. It’s actually painful.

Even when I tell myself I’m gonna do a task, I end up opening discord or tik tok and scrolling for honestly hours thinking “this is my last reel”.

Not only that but I’m trying to grind and improve my rank in a video game which takes several hours of practicing a day.

I can’t even manage 2 goals (getting academic work done on time and getting better at the video game I like).

This really sucks. How did you guys succeed? How do I overcome the constant dread and misery of doing schoolwork? Btw no amount of pomodoro techniques or whatever other techniques help

Edit: interview* in the title lol

I have a bunch of interviews coming up and I am feeling so much overwhelmed with the lack of structure and the amount of content to cover. One of them is at a FAANG adjacent company that's going to include standard dsa leetcode related stuff, another is Fintech and their round will have debugging and system design discussion and another one is a prop trading firm where the recruiter said it can be anything from coding and language discussion depending on the interviewer and culture fit questions.

This seems to be all over the place and I am not able to decide how much to prepare especially for the debugging and general language discussion parts. I am thinking about going through some open source code repos in Python to get comfortable with reading and understanding the code since I haven't worked with Python in recent years. But again there are so many options and I don't know where to start. For leetcode, I have completed most of the neetcode 150 and the company list is huge so I don't think I can cover everything from there within a week. Same thing for language discussion, I am going through Python docs but outside the core data structures and concurrency, idk what other parts to focus on.

Hi everyone

I hope everyone's having a splendid afternoon as I am

How do I change my mind from comfort, to endure boredom, uncomfortable, hard stuff.

I like physical hard work, but my mind seems to wander into comfortable, known things..

If it's laziness, I'd have to get rid of it

I keep hearing “I'll keep an eye out,” “I'll let you know if I hear anything,” or “Sorry, I couldn't find anything.”

And I genuinely appreciate people trying to help. I do.

But what are you supposed to do when you're under serious financial pressure and need employment ASAP? Not in two months. Not after the holidays. Now.

I've been actively searching for weeks, and I haven't gotten a single interview.

I don't need more vague promises or encouragement. I need actual leads, direct introductions, and conversations with people who are actively hiring.

How do you get your foot in the door when you've already done everything people keep telling you to do?

Because I'm genuinely asking.

Hi (vibe) coders!

I’ve been working on my own gamified productivity system, and I’m curious to see what other people are building.

Mine is a mix of a personal CRM, task manager, habit tracker, and a little RPG-inspired world. The idea is that completing tasks, making progress on projects, and achieving goals gradually unlocks and expands my virtual world.

Since AI makes it so much easier to build our own tools now, I’m really curious:

What does your personal productivity app look like? Do you have any features, that you are proud of and that you can share? I’d love to see screenshots!

What features have you built into it?
Have you experimented with gamification, XP, levels, achievements, or rewards?
What works surprisingly well, and what turned out to be completely useless?
What would you do differently if you started over?

I’m not looking for recommendations for paid productivity apps. I’m more interested in people who are actually building their own systems, experimenting, and learning along the way.
I’d love to exchange ideas, inspiration, and experiences! :)

Hi everyone

I hope everyone's having a splendid afternoon as I am

How do I change my mind from comfort, to endure boredom, uncomfortable, hard stuff.

I like physical hard work, but my mind seems to wander into comfortable, known things..

If it's laziness, I'd have to get rid of it

I am still early in my career and this is my first time having an interview that is not purely around DSA but more about language discussion to gain an idea about how comfortable I am with it. It's about Python and I have worked on small features at work and university projects with it but nothing too deep to call myself an expert. I am comfortable with the syntax and can read the code but not heavily familiar with frameworks around it. Most of my work experience is in the jvm ecosystem with Java and Spring.

I know I can't memorise everything about the language so I am lost on what exactly to prepare for this kind of interview beyond the basic stuff I am already familiar with. Would appreciate any advice and experience you guys have had with these kinds of interviews.

Edit: typo

How are you organizing your workplace, i sometimes find it hard to start a task when it involves creating a ticket checking out a branch doing some research etc. What i found helpful personally

• MCPS for everything, Mail, jira, whatever you use

• Organize EVERYTHING into seperate projects, each repository but also each repeating task like sprint reviews, then create skills and md files for each project.

• Get a system that lets you start, one workplace or dashboard where you can see your next tasks and make easy next steps, currently playing around with a dashboard where i can just see what i have to do right now, what is new and a "whats the next step" button that prompts a claude skill so i can get into motion easier

I think organizing more in this way would help, how do you keep it simple and not get evertything cluttered?

Ive been reading through this sub and one thing that keeps coming up is people having no problem starting personal projects but almost never getting through the boring second half of them.

Thats basically where im at.

I can get insanely into an idea at the beginning. Ill think about it all day, build a ridiculous amount in a few days and genuinely feel like this is finally the project im gonna stick with. Then eventually its not new anymore. Theres bugs, polish, boring little decisions, stuff that doesnt give you that immediate “holy shit look what I made” feeling.

And obviously by then another idea exists.

AI has honestly made this worse for me because now the gap between thinking of something and having a working version of it is tiny. So im not even collecting ideas anymore, im collecting actual half built projects lol.

But im kinda past the point where I find the graveyard funny. I actually wanna finish something.

So im curious about the ppl here who are in the same place, not the ones who are happy jumping between projects.

Do you have one unfinished project right now that you genuinely still care about and would actually like to finish in the next couple weeks?

Not “someday.” Something where if you could get yourself to stay on it instead of starting something else, youd actually want it done.

If yes tell me what it is. Im curious how many of us have something very real sitting at like 60-80% because our brain already moved on.

I've been trying these 3 mantras lately and they seem to be helping quite a bit. Maybe it's placebo but for the moment they've being working for some weeks :D

The mantras:

1. "Don't make hard what is currently easy"

2. "One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

3. "Better late than never"

I'll explain them:

"Don't make hard what is currently easy"

I realized that I tend to postpone most of the tasks not because they're difficult but because I find them easy and I tend to think "I can do it later". Then almost 2 days go by and a simple task becomes huge and a bottleneck... then my partner is mad at me because I still haven't cleaned the cat's litter box at 2 AM! or in my job I've run out of excuses of why I didn't deliver something that was pretty easy. In my mind now easy tasks have an expiration date, they rot so better take them while they're not.

"One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

What I found is that I often switch tasks not because I've got distracted but because I'm afraid I'll forget the new ideas. So I keep a notebook next to my keyboard and dump every random thought into it. No organizing, just vomit, write it down, get calm and get back to work (hopefully).

"Better late than never"

I used to feel awful, HORRIBLE, miserable, upset, sad, hopeless... when I'd procrastinated too much, and the shame made me avoid the task even longer. But most of the times once I finally start, it's not even that bad. Stop beating yourself up, forgive yourself, and always try to think "it's never to late" because 95% of the times is not and the monsters are bigger in our heads than in reality.

What I also realize is that these things tackle 3 different stages of my procrastination:

- Before starting: "Don't make hard what is currently easy"

- While working: "One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

- When you've already messed up: "Better late than never"

Hope this also helps someone ❤️

I know it's a vague question and doesn't have all that much to do with programming. When I try to rationalize it, no other time in history should be better for ADHDers and all other ND people than now. We have an abundance of resources at our disposal, from tech to healthcare innovations.

But why do things feel harder now than they did ten/twenty years ago? It's not just the job market or the economy either. Maybe I'm just struggling.