Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2025?

A good ADHD coach can be life-changing, as cheesy and corny as it sounds. As you’re likely aware (but for the benefit of everyone else), the ADHD brain is not extrinsically and intrinsically motivated by the exact same things of someone with a more neurotypical brain.

An ADHD brain is more motivated by external Urgency while a more neurotypical will be motivated externally by Importance. This often leads to ADHD people being perceived as anywhere from flakey, unreliable, to totally unconcerned with problems and/or commitments. In social relationships, they are perceived as being anywhere from touch and go to just unwilling to invest into social bonds. The worst part is that if you are able to mask well in one area, you just don’t have the energy to mask everywhere else. It’s like an unwinnable game of wack-a-mole.

It has taken many years and losing so much to get to where I am and it’s still objectively shit. Knowing that every in the world is not made for how your brain functions and is often made specifically for how the majority of people’s brain functions is depressing.

I’ve found that very carefully selecting work that lets me lean into my specific strengths (good under pressure, able to dive deep on technical problems and pull out results, and being a good business communicator), in conjunction with aggressively automating or pre-preparing parts of my life that suck (laying out clothes/tools/equipment the night before, having a checking “escrow” account all my auto bill pay gets pulled out of) helps me function more efficiently.

It gets better, you can carve newer and deeper neural-pathways by sticking to routines, and finding ways to get that dopamine.

Also medication, that really helps.

Functional programming, either Haskell or Ocaml. Been putting it off for years. I know at least a glimpse of it from other languages. Just haven't doubled down to actually studying it formally.

It seems like the options are 1) MicroPython, which is really easy to use (use python for everything) but lacking in anything lower level to a quick restriction on what you can do. 2) C, which I've used before and understand, but going from the Arduino or PlatformIO experience would require a lot of learning as well. 3) Rust (with embedded_hal and embassy), which is newer, along with different language, but with ability to go lower level with complies, and seeming overall goal to be more widely used.

College was all C/C++ so I've used that before, so I can understand and pick up the code. Since I have brief experience rather than your experience, I'm betting that the time it'd take for me to get up to speed with C and fuller dev environments would take as long as with Rust, and since I can use rust in more applications for what I do professionally, I'm figuring to put the time there.

What have you built and with what in your 25 years? Too many posts and vids about these things are intro rather than more in depth. It's great to hear from people who actually do this into production rather than mini-projects.

Spanish! Been learning for about 4 months and just had my first opportunity to speak a lot, stayed with a spanish speaking family for 4 days. It went much worse than expected, I couldnt understand anything and spoke so slowly that I only had a few oppirtubities to join the conversation. So I hope by the end of 2025 ill be a little more fluent.

Using a program called learncraft spanish currently and its been very very effective imo. Recommendations for learning strategies are welcome!

English, German, and all hard skills i'm slacking off: Cloud, Deep knowledge of networking and linux. Maybe finish reading Design Data Intensive Applications for good. And definitely getting a Java certification as I find it useful as a personal metric.

For my hobbies, I still hope to get things organized (in my computer, my desk and my mind) to record some metal composings.