ADHDev.

Hello & good day to you all! I have a tendency to be rather wordy, so I will endeavour to keep this post (and future ones) as concise as possible.

I have combined-type ADHD, and when I was diagnosed in the early oughts, it felt like there was finally an answer to what I had been struggling with all my life. It took a while to find the right medication for myself, but that alone only opens the door. Cognitive behavioral therapy is as important if not more important because it takes a long time to de-program yourself from the habits you developed so that you could function even minimally.

Fast forward to the fall of 2023 when I had gastric bypass surgery due to my type 2 diabetes. My weight & blood sugar levels came down to normal levels, and not being able to eat a lot meant eating less refined carbohydrates as well, which meant vastly improved mood & focus.

Still, there are things I am trying to improve upon, including my stubborn insistence to read a book before embarking on a task, or at least do it contemporaneously. However, I work full-time, my family just moved to Alaska, and I have a busy family life with lots of animals, volunteer work and other responsibilities. Crucially, people who have ADHD need the right amount of structure & prioritization to get things done, but even then, you have to be flexible when life happens. In other words, it is hard to maintain momentum on any sort of substantial work, let alone finish it.

I absolutely love reading, learning, and improving. So, it was a very difficult decision to decide that - in 2025 - I wouldn't read any books (if I could help it). Why?

I need to do; to just start then do. My whole life, the longer I waited to do a project, the harder it was to go back to it, which made me feel that I needed to prepare more, but I never had time to do that, which resulted in more waiting, and the cycle repeated.

So, I vowed to not embark on any books this year. I go with the knowledge I have (unless I know absolutely zero, then a tutorial or YouTube video may be in order). But I have to get used to doing it, to starting - which as the old quote goes, is the key to getting ahead.

In other words, I shouldn't jump in knowing zero, but work off of a little bit knowledge (or what I already know), apply, reflect, realign, get more knowledge (if the previous application didn't yield much), apply, rinse & repeat.

I was now going to talk about a personal software development project that I embarked upon once again, and excitingly I've made more progress on it in the past week than I have in the past year. I'd like to go through how I jumped back in, how I refreshed my knowledge of the (relatively small) codebase, what challenges I encountered, and my chain of decisions that led me down the current path that I'm now going down with the project.

But I will conclude at this time so as to keep this read short & manageable in order to respect your time.

I will write about the above in my next entry. Until then, “down the trail”.