41–50 of 288 posts
When a problem has my attention, nothing can phase me. I get hyperfocused. Music, colors, the need to eat or sleep.. doesn't matter. All that gets put aside, the thing that has my attention has my full and undivided attention When something doesn't grab me, it takes enormous effort to maintain focus. It's not that other distractions are just so incredibly moving that they take my focus away. Rather, it's that it's ph…
Am I the only one that finds debugging not monotonous at all? Often the programming feels more monotonous. I'm not sure if that's because I feel like I'm learning something when I'm debuggging or that a bug is a puzzle to solve, I feel like a detective and a scientist figuring out things about my small part of the universe. In comparison programming feels like playing with sand in the desert. Where you can do everything but it's hard to decide what and where and ultimately whatever you build doesn't really feel impactful. It's still a desert and those are still just sandcastles.
I might have ADHD, I suffer from a lot of the same inconveniences at similar intensity that ADHD diagnosed adults suffer from.
I find it interesting though that they describe "debugging" as a monotonous activity. Maybe my experience is different from others? I personally find debugging to be way more active than coding! It involves setting breakpoints, zooming about the codebase trying to understand the flow of an app and cutting down code until you get a minimized repro. I'm often doing this live with users or other devs looking over my shoulder while I play with code all over the place and run git bisections. It's often a time sensitive activity too, because a bug might be blocking a release or requiring a fast prod rollback. From an executive dysfunction POV, a bug report is often the perfect kind of task for me, inherently scoped, usually short, with a clear success condition.
I personally thrive on that kind of work and I usually really enjoy being on the support rota (not for too long though!) In fact if anything, I enjoy it too much and bug reports don't uncommonly take me away from the actual dev work I should be doing.
I think the issue is that they probably didn't do the debugging tests under the right conditions.
As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…
Same here. I try to see the bright side, where I am basically forced to write "clean" code because anything else just doesn't fit my buffer. And I feel a kinship with current LLMs with small context sizes.
So a low frills just the code IDE is better for ADHD. Wonder if single monitor and even single code pane at a time also boosts an ADHD brains productivity. Suspect it does. Another aspect of focus is fixation on a specific physical space with lowered blink rate. As soon as you move your eyes away or blink it lowers your concentration. The text outside of this cone of sight is less sharp. It's like a hunter that finds…
> participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging) Am I the only one that finds debugging not monotonous at all? Often the programming feels more monotonous. I'm not sure if that's because I feel like I'm learning something when I'm debuggging or that a bug is a puzzle to solve, I feel like a detective and a scientist figuring out things about my small part of the univers…
I just wrote the same comment. My guess is that their debugging task wasn't really representative of real life debugging.
From my own personal experience, it would explain why when I use window managers like i3wm and Yabai versus regular desktop that I am more effective and efficient. Somehow window managers just fits perfectly like glove for my brain. I don't get that cognitive load overhead when I have million different tabs and windows and programs and notes just splattered in a single screen. It's all neatly hidden away until I need…
I currently is bspwm on my personal laptop, and work on a Mac, and it was a brutal change to go back to a non-tiled wm at work (I tried without as an experiment to see how I'd feel about it when I first got the new work machine - the jury is in: It's absolutely awful; Yabai is heaven in comparison). As far back as the 1980's when I was using an Amiga, I'd always effectively work full screen or with carefully tiled la…
Finally some research on ADHD and UI. I have it and have always found GUIs confusing as hell. Most people seem to find Windows an intuitive OS, for instance. Not me. Windows up to and including XP felt pretty intuitive, but since then every version has gotten more confusing. I never know where to find stuff, how to navigate around. I'm sure there are visual cues that I'm just not capable of processing. Icons for butt…
whoever created the UI/ UX in MS Teams needs a good talking to MS Teams overloads my brain through very bad design
"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.
From what I skim read the debugging task involved finding places where the wrong type of indentation was used (python) So I'd describe it as pretty monotonous, even if most debugging isn't!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. I try to see the bright side, where I am basically forced to write "clean" code because anything else just doesn't fit my buffer. And I feel a kinship with current LLMs with small context sizes.
It's funny, my input buffer may be small and it's a large mental drain to read busy code (ADHD con), however once I grasp how a code base works it's just there (ADHD pro). It makes me wonder if it's related to the hunter-gatherer origin hypothesis. In that scenario covering large tracks of land was beneficial and that ability can be used to mentally map code. The flop side this also leads to distractibility and bored…