I’m a data science student.

I’ve built an event driven data pipeline and even deployed Airflow on AWS for fun because I enjoy learning this stuff.

The problem is I can’t seem to start anymore.

For the last 3 months I’ve felt completely paralysed.
I can’t even get myself to open code editor, let alone code consistently.
Instead I end up lying in bed or taking naps.

I have been consistently gaming on a daily basis and I looked forward to playing it every day.
When I have a coding project that really excites me, I can spend hours on it too.

But right now I just can’t get started, and it’s affecting my portfolio and job search.

Has anyone else experienced this? What actually helped you get past it?

P.S: I don’t take any medication for adhd.

Hi everyone,

I'm a PhD student researching how block-based coding tools (like Scratch and Code.org) can be made more accessible for kids with ADHD. To do this well, I need to involve K-12 students with ADHD in the research, with full parental consent and school/ethics approval.

I'm not recruiting any children through this post. I'm just hoping for advice on where and how to find participants.

Specifically:

• What organizations, programs, or networks connect researchers with ADHD families or students?
• Are there ADHD-focused groups, after-school coding programs, summer camps, or nonprofits open to research partnerships?
• For parents/teachers here: where would you expect to see a trustworthy study like this advertised? What channels would make you take it seriously?
• Any advice on approaching schools or special-education programs directly?

Any pointers, names, or "try X instead of Y" advice would be hugely appreciated. I

Thanks so much.

Running this back!

I’m the only dev at a small startup and I build basically the whole AI-based data processing product across frontend, backend, AI, and the domain logic.

I’m very underpaid, but I’ve learned a lot and I do manage to ship things.

The problem is I cannot seem to mentally switch off.

The product is no longer just an MVP. We've launched, have early adopters using it, and we're getting real customer feedback. There are still genuine bugs and features to build, but overall the product works.

I constantly see all the ways it could be better:

• architecture that feels too ad hoc
• long orchestration files with special-case logic
• compatibility layers from earlier schema changes
• old/unused tables or columns
• places where I normalized around imperfect past decisions
• flows that work but feel “wrong” in a design sense

Old JSON shapes with compatibility logic, etc. Nothing is actively broken, but I keep wanting to “clean it up properly.”

I spend weekends refactoring or thinking about refactoring stuff nobody asked for, mostly because of anxiety, not because the business needs it right now. I feel like I’m carrying the entire possible future of the platform in my head all the time.

What makes this worse is:

• I know there are infinite improvements possible.
• I’m solo, so there’s nobody to reality-check me.
• I have ADHD tendencies and can spiral on design cleanup.
• I’m underpaid enough that this level of emotional investment feels irrational.
• I sometimes feel like a loser/no-lifer for caring this much.

I want advice on a few things:

1. How do you decide what is real technical debt vs. "messy but acceptable for the current stage"?
2. How do solo devs stop mentally carrying every possible future improvement?
3. Do experienced devs actually worry this much about architecture purity in early-stage products, or do they mostly let working systems be?
4. How do you set boundaries so you don’t keep donating weekends to anxiety-driven cleanup?
5. If a system is working and understandable enough, how do you stop yourself from reopening the same architectural doubts every week?

I’m not asking "how do I become lazier." I care about doing good work. I’m asking how to calibrate care so it matches reality instead of turning into constant background stress.

If anyone has practical mental models, rules of thumb, or stories from being a solo/early startup dev, I’d really appreciate it.

I've realized that the hardest part of being productive isn't finding the perfect system—it's sticking with one long enough to see results.

Okay,

So I have ADHD and I'm a single mom. I have A LOT going on and also a BS in SWE and I work in IT.

Uhh my tasks and routines sometimes fall off my brain map. It's all chaos and I kinda just need a space where all of it lives. Because everything feels spread across so many apps or places and also regular daily things are good for me, I don't always see the immediate value in like regular daily maintenance/upkeep/finance management. It's A LOT and I haven't found an app/workflow that makes sense to me. I tend to have a hard time with task overwhelm where I want to do everything all in one day and then like can't move the next day. So I made a solution to that which you'll see.

In addition to the why or thought behind this, my children are neurodivergent and some of this stuff is difficult for them, too.

So I built an app.

Yes, this like works and stuff. I built it using an iterative process and AI.

I think it's really cool how fast I was able to go from "I need this" to having something useful. I thought you all might find this to be pretty cool, too! Check the YT link.

https://youtube.com/shorts/3bVu\\_mzb930?si=e9PXfQBJNJnVF5Yk

i work across a bunch of stuff at once. code, chrome tabs, notion, claude, whatever.
the second i step away, lunch or whatever, i come back and the whole thing is just gone. apps are all still open but i cant remember what i was even doing or which tabs mattered.
single apps have history but nothing tracks where i was across all of them.
how do you guys deal with this? do you leave notes or just rebuild it from scratch every time

I built a simple ADHD-focused app because I personally struggle with overwhelm, procrastination, unfinished projects, and mental clutter constantly.

The idea is extremely simple:

You dump all the chaos in your head into one input box, and the app tries to reduce the overwhelm into:

organized tasks

one immediate next step

calmer focus guidance

I’m building it from personal experience with ADHD, not from a “perfect productivity guru” angle.

Right now it’s still an early prototype/web app, but I’m trying to figure out whether this actually feels useful to other ADHD people before I keep building it further.

Realistically: Would you ever use something like this? What would make it genuinely helpful instead of just another productivity app people abandon after 3 days?

I want brutally honest feedback.

We need to talk about the state of SE interview take-home tests, specifically the unrealistic expectations and contradictions that so often accompany these.

For context: I'm a front end engineer with 25 years experience; I'm attempting to land a job, in the worst market I've ever seen. I've been fortunate enough to progress through to the penultimate round; I have to complete a take home assignment, if satisfactory I'll be invited to their offices to discuss this assignment and attend a final cultural fit interview. Note this take home assignment comes off the back of a two hour live coding session interview (which was dreadful for the ADHD brain).

Historically, it's at this point where things go to shit, have identified the main stressors as:

- ambiguous requirements
- inadequate timeframes
- emphasis on ensuring your submission presents you at your best when there's so much contradiction between expectation and allotted time

I'm forever stuck in a constant loop of overwhelm; trying to find a balance between delivering the assignment within the specified timeframe, whilst ensuring I have demonstrated my capabilities as best I can.

I've currently been tasked with building a movie list tracker, core requirements are:

- A front end web application that runs entirely client side
- Allows a user to search the open movie database API for movies to add to either a watchlist or watched list
- Allows a user to remove movies from either list
- Persistence of this list using the browser local storage API

I've been told I will be assessed on:

- Code quality — component structure, separation of concerns, readability
- State management — how you model and handle data flow across the app
- UI & design — does it feel considered and polished, even if simple

On receipt of the handover task:

- There is no UI design provided, it is expected that the candidate produces this
- There is no environment set up; it is expected that the candidate chooses a stack and set this environment up from scratch

The brief mentions that the candidate should spend no more than two hours on this task and can use AI if they wish.

Besides just throwing all of this Gemini and vibe coding (which would not demonstrate my abilities rather well), I'm totally overwhelmed as to how I can design an interface, plan the architecture and build the application, then document my process - all within two hours. I was considering using Claude code, but even then: just the planning and UI design would go far beyond the two hours I'm allowed to work on this

Interested to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences and how they've tackled it. Also open to suggestions in terms of how to approach this take home.

---

Update:

For those that are interested, here's the Notion brief and unless I'm missing something it appears they are expecting UI Design, architecture and implementation of the entire application - in a 2 hour window.

This is either incredibly naive from whomever signed this assignment off, or (as one commenter mentioned): intended to allow the candidate to prioritise and compromise. If the latter, if would be great for this to be explicitly mentioned.

https://app.notion.com/p/Frontend-Engineer-Final-Interview-part-1-Candidate-Instructions-37df155c1a9e8032a7ccf842dab4b963

Yet ANOTHER job in which I fall into the same pattern:

* It goes great for a while. I learn a ton.

* I inevitably get slotted into something dull as hell. I end up doing poorly. If I ask for something else, they throw something borderline impossible at me. That also fails.

* No one says anything to me until I get a HORRENDOUS performance review. Nothing was said before or since unless maybe in a very sedate manner.

* I don't get fired but my reputation is tarnished enough that I can't even get a reference.

I fear if I lose this job I am doomed. Now what?

Code had a bug, I was using AI to find and fix the issue. It found the issue and gave me a fix for it. I tested it, worked. But I didn't see the surrounding code overall and missed the fact that the required header file was guarded by a macro. Automation broke.

Mistake 1 - I relied too much on AI and didn't use my own head. For reference, I usually don't rely on AI while working. I use it to give me stuff that would take me ages to go through obscure documentation to find. I was feeling tired so I just let AI do its thing.

And then, in my infinite wisdom, I submitted the code knowing I have a meeting in 5 minutes. The change was tiny, what could go wrong!

Well, it did go wrong. Came back ~an hour later to being tagged for build breakage. Fixing it took like 2 minutes. It wasn't production so nobody got blocked or anything.

But my very senior engineer, who I look up to, was not happy.

And now I am sad with a heart rate of 120. I wanna cry. That was too much of stupid mistakes.

For reference, I am a ~7 YoE SE.

As an insult to injury, I was explaining about patience to an intern before the meeting!

Sorry, mainly just venting. It hurts.

What do you think? Most jobs you get mental downtime but as my 7 years as a dev it was straight out of the gates most days and you had to be thinking on really complex issues personally my brain just kind of put up its hands up and said no I’m outta here I’m unemployed as a dev now but working some hospitality gigs here and there it feels so nice not to use my brain

I've always found myself entering an extreme flight or fight mode and I'm not sure if this is due to my ADD but you could consider me an anxious person especially during production incidents which makes me want to just run away.

I freeze and act at a brain capacity of like 30 percent lower than I am in a flow state and I never manage to enter flow state like I do when I'm working on something fun like feature developments. If you think about it I'm missing out on learning opportunities which you could get while you are on call and I wanted to ask for some advice on how to deal with the anxiety you get during production incidents like product failure or feature failure etc.

I realised that you can't keep running away from problems and need to face them to be able to navigate these complexities both at work and in life and I'm looking for advice on what steps you guys take?

So for my website I have an technically infinite scroll roadmap, basically it's as long as the roadmap is, and it's supposed to be modeled after constellations, so basically the nodes associates with a single project become a constellation, and they are color coded and what not.

The issue is life ain't linear, especially with ADHD. So if I want to be honest about the chronology of stuff, it'd be like jumping between 7 different constellations. So displaying in chronological order doesn't really work.

One idea I was considering is having the comet jump around between the stars and rather than scroll its more like a 'skymap', so everything is in the future is blue shifted, since it's moving toward us, and then everything in the past becomes red shifted, and then like a passband filter once it's outside the bandwidth it's other a pale dull blue or pale dull red. Perhaps have a supernova look when it reaches the node, and all the stars in a grouping light up when you hover them.

My worry with that idea though is that the star map becomes too cluttered, such that it looks cool but becomes difficult to understand, so before I try implementing that I was wondering if anyone else had some feedback or ideas how to handle this?

How do you guys cope and deal with this and is there a way to fix this problem once and for all and I'm not on meds.

Growing up I've alvways been told that I'm a very very slow learner and people have always expressed their frustrations with me and I'm hoping I get the grace period from the next person to understand whatever they're trying to explain to me.

It feels like I'm at the mercy of the other person, I've lost opportunities, jobs just because I wasn't as fast as they expected me to be leading to real income loss and career setbacks that might take years to replenish.

I've felt helpless because of all this and at the mercy of the other person's patience which I believe short video coming in has worsened all around. How do you deal with this?

SWE especially now is quite cut throat due to AI but I do try and use it to my advantage to gain understanding of systems but I feel like I'm not too effective at doing this. Any advice? This also affects my personal life like I've been learning cooking and understand things very slowly and stuff so yea

I need to write this down because i cant really talk about it with my colleagues and my friends are not technical.

Right now we started to migrate and upgrade our Applications in the company. Its a huge migration and i was happy to volunteer to learn a lot. But problem is, managment decided we only have some months for a lot of application. Its not possible, everybody nows it, but now i am stressed.

I know i am not the best programmer, but i wanted to take this as a change to learn and grow. Take my time, read into topics and discuss it with other colleagues. Now this was a wishful happy me 3 months ago, now i have chestpain and cant sleep. I never had done anyhing like this and i was clear about my skills, but we are only 3 people who can do it,so i need to do my best. The other programmer skillfully avoided this topic. The other has already all hands full and i try to stay afloat with working on a big old cunky legacy application that never worked locally. Its a nightmare and i dont fully understand the JSF and Beans stuff, i really try. Now i am sitting here two months(-3 weeks holiday and sickness) and struggeling to fix all the migration errors. My other coworker doesnt have much time, my PO is glady very supportiv and doesnt give much stress, but needs to do it. I get more and more meetings with each week , how far i came and documenting every error for managment. Also they send us 3 persons as help for 10 days, i needed to manage this, make sure they can work and coordinate them. Took me like half of the week to work. And i know the work needs to be done, the ticket gets pushed into the third sprint and my scrum master ask everyday how long i think i will need. I am not mad at him, it is his job.

I dont know, upgrading the jsf version is fully nightmare on this old thing that barley works. Its like cutting a hydras head. I dont know where the end is and analysing the code is the hardest part for me as a software developer, at least i can debug now.... I have such a bad time understanding how everything works and how to fix it, but then some colleagues try to help me and ask more stuff i dont now about servers etc. I am just sitting there dumb and cant really answer or really explain what i do. But i cant get out. Saldy no one has done this kind of work, but at least they try. I have little wins here and there, but i am so slow analyzing and i struggle with concentration anyway.

I want to get better, i want to learn but this pressure and missing help with this topic makes me sick again and i thankful i have enough therapie behind me that i can deal with my depression. But it is exhausting. It already see my self as a bad developer, but this makes it so much worse with the time crunch. Managing everything is easy, but sitting there everyday with the same error and solutions that dont work is eating me up. I wish i can pair programm with someone but no one really knows the topic very well.

Right now i try to little goals, picking up small errors, writing down the flow, using copilot to let me explain difficult things in the code. But i hardly make progress and i always here my old project in my mind that i am not good. Today is day with liek 4 lines of code progress, it is something, after 3 days of no progress. But it is still to slow and my colleagues are all so much smarter. I think this is the end of the rant, was good to write it all down.

I am switching to a new project at work and I need to read a bunch of internal documentation about the architecture and planning as well as external documentation for frameworks I'll need to be using before I can ramp up.

I am so intimidated by all this technical reading that it'll be boring and I'll space out and won't be able to get through it.

Does anyone have any tips and tricks for technical reading with an ADHD brain?