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Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

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Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#101

Post by pxc »

carlmr wrote: post #53
dkh wrote: post #16

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…

>it is easy for me to flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once. So much this. Fuck OOP-inheritance-thinking for spreading implementations to so many files.

I also find this splitting-out that happens with OOP extremely unhelpful. I'd never considered that problem being exacerbated by ADHD, but it makes perfect sense.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#102

Post by ddorian43 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #54
dkh wrote: post #16

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…

> unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained Tangent: ADHD is strange. I have it too, and yet when it comes to reading my symptoms appear to be the exact opposite (when I was younger I could not stop reading books until I finished them, even if I ended up skipping an entire night of sleep for it). I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decades…

You get hyper-focus when you're interested in something. So both can't read a paragraph and can read non-stop happen in ADHD depending on your interest in reading.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#103

Post by dagmx »

formulathree wrote: post #100
dagmx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type hinting , not assertion, is a part of Python. Type checking is analysis post facto and doesn’t account for dynamicism of classes. The very ability to self modify an instance at any time or use __getattr__ makes it incredibly dynamic. It also doesn’t account for every dependency having accurate type hints or any at all.

modern python development is used in conjunction with an external type checker. That's what I meant. My mistake for not being clear. Obviously the python interpreter itself does not do any type checks. It's sort if like how modern development with javascript is used with an external compiler of another language (typescript) that compiles a typed language into one without types.

Yeah but my rebuttal is that even with type hints and adequate type checking, that Python is too dynamic to trust consistent behaviour.

An object can conform to a type in name only, but that’s not enough to tell you what methods or attributes exist on it at any given time.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#104

Post by wpietri »

dagmx wrote: post #73
branko_d wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer" The good news is that "smallness of bran buffer" doesn't matter very much if you are trying to implement anything non-trivial. Most useful software is so complex that it's impossible to keep all of it in your head in any case. But we can divide and conquer complexity without holding too much in our limited human heads at any single momen…

I disagree. It really does matter if you have any afflictions that exacerbate it. It maybe doesn’t matter for relative performance versus other developers but it does matter for the individual. Having frequent context switches just to keep on top of your work can be really draining. How much it matters also really depends on the languages you’re working in. Taking a couple languages I use regularly for example: Pytho…

On the other hand, I'd encourage you to see this awareness of cognitive load as a strength. Good code is approachable, and some of the worst code I've written was when I felt the most brilliant. If I've used all my brainpower to write something, then what do I do later when I need to debug it or integrated it? So now I really try to write such that I lower the cognitive load for future me and other developers.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#105

Post by asyx »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #71
dkh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is how I was when I was younger, too. I read everything, I read pretty fast, and I could read for hours on end. That is no longer the case at all, and I'm uncertain when or why it changed so drastically. (The "when" is tough to pinpoint because for much of my early 20s I wasn't doing much reading, and it's possible that the "why" is related to some change my brain underwent during/because of that.)

I lost my reading tendency when life got harder. The urgency and anxiety around keeping up with everyday life made activities like reading almost unsettling slow and “unproductive”. I realized that and did something about it, but I didn’t allow myself to enjoy a book for around 10 years. Not sure if that resonates with you (I hope not!) but I figured I’d mention it just in case. I was totally unaware of what I was do…

What did you do about it? I'm exclusively a vacation reader. When I have limited free time, reading competes with other hobbies or media and almost never wins just because a book is such a huge time investment compared to a movie or a video game and I'd really like to change that.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#106

Post by tomjakubowski »

npunt wrote: post #81
dkh wrote: post #16

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…

This idea of a 'small brain buffer' is why I love writing small atomic notes in wikis [1]. It lets me break problems down into simple pieces that I can later assemble upward in abstraction, rather than try to hold complex ideas in my head and compile them together in one big document. The buffer waxes and wanes, and I need to be able to adapt my writing process so I'm productive no matter where it is at the moment. […

I've been doing this too in Obsidian and really like it.

Notes can be as short or long as feels right. If they need to grow they can grow, sometimes they get split into sub notes.

I have notes with titles like "Cardboard furniture", "Staging patch changes in VSCode", and "Hilbert Transform".

Some are one or two sentences, some are more like essays with subheadings.

Small notes tend to have one or two links to other notes. Longer notes have more links and tend towards centralization (eg all booking info about an upcoming work trip).

Search makes it easy to find the notes that don't have links.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#107

Post by devjab »

dkh wrote: post #16

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…

Interestingly I do the same as you, partly because the single responsibility part of SOLID, but also because it just appeals to me to write clean easily understandable code. It’s for different reasons than you, however, my ADHD brain can “buffer” massive amounts of code… for a while. So I mainly write things simply because it’s much easier for me to “get back to” after 6 months, well, and because it’s clean code. I think it’s interesting that we end up with the same sort of code architecture though, despite not being affected by our ADHD the same.

For me the real struggle isn’t focus or “buffer”, it’s when things are boring. For almost all code work, even debugging, my hyperfocus grinds into gear, and if I’m left undisturbed I can quite literally work for 10 hours straight without eating. I don’t, because there is a bill to pay after doing so and I’ve worked on myself for decades to the point where I know to take breaks, eat and go home, but the hyperfocus is there.

Until things get boring. Luckily this is rare with code. Not so with everything related to the process of being allowed to write code. I try to work in places where the process people bother you as little as possible, and if I can avoid it, I’ll happily go through the rest of my career without ever pretending to listen in another standup meeting ever again.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#108

Post by lachlan_gray »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #8

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…

This is why I’m convinced vim is great for the ADHD brain. You don’t need to remember where something is or what it looks like, you just have to know the name of what you want to do, and you tell the editor to do it!

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#109

Post by brundolf »

It's crossed my mind before, that my extremely strong preference for static analysis > tests > debugging might be related to my ADHD

There's something unbearable to me about manually recreating state, waiting for longer-running results as a part of my workflow, arranging multiple processes to talk to each other, etc. Anything where I have to mentally track and manage several moving parts at once. It feels like a huge attention-burden that makes it way harder to think about the problem I'm trying to solve, and makes me more likely to lose context and get stuck in the mud

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#110

Post by brucificus »

I had something flickering in my IDE the other day while I was trying to learn my way around a large monolithic codebase at a new job. I couldn't executive function well enough to stop/hide the flickering, and I couldn't ignore it. I eventually had a meltdown and left the room (wfh, thankfully). It took me hours to recover.

Having a tidy, visually "muted" workspace - both in a literal sense (the IDE) as well as a conceptual sense (the code structure) - is very important for coping with my ADHD+ASD. Unfortunately, trying to sell DRY+KISS+YAGNI+SOLID as an accessibility/inclusivity concern has not worked out for me yet.

There's a lot of intellectual elitism running in the veins of our profession, and it makes me sad that it's often likely just a shield for other people nursing insecurities about similar struggles. We need to work on our empathy, and coding empathetically, and designing UIs empathetically.

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