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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

#111

Post by ck425 »

bippihippi1 wrote: post #90
dagmx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least for me, naturally having experienced needing to context switch often (getting disctracted or multithreading or refreshing forgotten context), I have gotten good at it not by remebering more but by storing the context in an easily retrievable place. I keep tabs open, I print out stuff even when breakpoint debugging, and I reduce my cognitive load by default. I remember where to look to find the data, because…

People are shocked when they see how many tabs I have open. I just checked and I've 21 windows each with atleast 10 tabs, but the more frequently used one are 30+. But it really does help. I also group them by topic and when I need to focus I start a new window with the tabs for that particular task.

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

#112

Post by therealdrag0 »

ansgri wrote: post #3

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06376 – non-paywalled paper https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/adhd-study – experimental data

Thank you!

No one is discussing the details just their personal experience. I’m not able to read it yet but curious what are the effect sizes? Is faster 1ms or 1 minute, etc.

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

#113

Post by vogon_laureate »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #106
npunt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It's been a game changer for me. I always did this anyway in other Notes apps, but Obsidian just does a great job of making it feel like it almost prefers you to write notes like that.

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

#114

Post by rpastuszak »

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 for this reason that I try to write what I feel is very obvious or self-explanatory code [...]

I don't have ADHD, but, for different reasons, my brain seems to work in a similar manner. And, I have developed coping strategies similar to those applied with people on the ADHD spectrum [1][2].

My anxiety around coding has reduced a significantly when I learned about TDD and started writing code made of very small, composable chunks. I even use the same "small buffer" metaphor when talking about this!

I know that some people with ADHD use the writing tool I built for myself. If you have a moment, feel free to give it a shot and let me know what you think: https://enso.sonnet.io

(the web version is free, and has complete feature parity, no need to pay me)

- [1] https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/

- [2] https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

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

#115

Post by bitwize »

Oh. So it's not just me then.

For years I thought I was missing out by not having acclimated to modern IDEs like JetBrains or Visual Studio Code. I find features like autocomplete aggravatingly distracting, and when I want to do something the IDE or a plugin didn't account for, it often becomes a manual process.

By contrast, with Emacs, I can simply omit the addition of features that distract me from the code, and I can automate away manual workflow pain points with a few lines of Emacs Lisp, evaluating them right in my running editor and saving them off.

But I wondered if that was some sort of Bruce Tognazzini "your brain is gaslighting you, and you're leaving productivity on the table by not using the objectively superior UI" type phenomenon. Based on this research... well, I guess not. Comforting to know.

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

#116

Post by ck425 »

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…

Could that be a learned adaption to ADHD rather than a directly caused trait? Or just hyper focus?

I do have a pet theory that many of us ADHDers develop habits to overcompensate but do so early enough that we don't realise they're learned. For example my room growing up was always super tidy, I literally never had to be asked to clean it and I'd know straight away if someone had been in while I was out. That really confused me when I got diagnosed but in hindsight it's because without everything having a consistent place I'd constantly lose things and never find anything.

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

#117

Post by mattgreenrocks »

formulathree wrote: post #87
dagmx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Modern python is no longer dynamic. Type checking is a big part of python now. Python also has ADTs which match it in power to rust.

The problem is less the language and more the culture around it. Typing will always be second-class, culturally. Additionally, mypy feels much slower to use versus something like Rust’s ‘cargo check’.

Regarding ADTs: do type checkers ensure totality (all cases covered) when pattern matching?

(I’m not casting aspersions here. It is what it is, you know?)

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

#118

Post by ck425 »

flir wrote: post #61
vanderZwan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Already has to a degree - hyperactive type and inattentive type. But you've also got to consider personal taste - hyperfixation happens when it's something you're interested in. Someone else might hyperfocus on video games, or trawling ebay, or researching a topic.

I read recently that they're starting to view hyperactive and inattentive as different presentations of the same symptoms/root causes rather than different types ie the same things that make hyperactive ADHD not sit still make inattentive constantly go off on mental tangents.

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

#119

Post by wpm »

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…

I detest the modern trend of "grey-on-grey" hieroglyphics. Everything melts into some amorphous blob of whitespace with some scribbles on it, and you just have to magically know or painfully learn that this little scribble means "Sharpen" and this one means "Smudge". And god forbid we add a little color! Or detailed icons where I can look for an actual shape of something like "blue folder with yellow splotch", which my brain reinforces as meaning "Sharing Preferences" every time I use it since it says "Sharing" right underneath it.

If you download Pixelmator Pro on a Mac, on first launch (controlled by preference key `toolsOnboardingCompleted` in the plist), the default toolset on the right side of the window is a row of small, grey, hieroglyphics , but with textual labels off to the side. The moment you select one, the labels disappear forever to "make room" for a vertical pane with settings for the tool you have selected. Which, thank god, it's not like I have 2880 horizontal pixels to use.

You are given 1 single moment to learn what all these stupid tiny grey blobs mean, otherwise, you get to wait 5 seconds for the tooltip to appear to let you know. Hence, I never use Pixelmator until I absolutely have to, because it's a load of ballache to use. The people studying UX academically know that text labels are good. But muh SiMpLiCiTy! Muh MiNimALiSm! It's gotten absurd.

FWIW, if you're on macOS, and the application you're using is displaying an NSToolbar, you can typically force it into "Icon and Text" mode even if that option isn't displayed in the context menu on the toolbar by using PlistBuddy. Find the app's preferences `.plist` file, then look for a Key called `NSToolbar Configuration someUUID`. That key's dict will have a key called "TBDisplayMode". Setting it to 1 will force it into Icon and Text. Setting it to 3 will force it to Text Only. For example, I can force Pixelmator Pro to show me just text labels on the top toolbar of the window (the actual tool palette is some other likely custom UI component) by running:

  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set NSToolbar\ Configuration\ bigLongUUID:TB\ Display\ Mode 3" /homedir/Library/Containers/com.pixelmatorteam.pixelmator.x/Data/Library/Preferences/com.pixelmatorteam.pixelmator.x.plist
Then just quit and relaunch. The key's possible values are in the enum here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nstoolbar/d...

This is one of the minor but "big in my mind" reasons I despise most web-app-in-a-box apps: they almost universally do not use CoreFoundation APIs to get preference keys from a file, which means none of what I sussed out, tested, and applied in the 10 minutes it took for me to hunt these keys down and find the documentation works.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

devjab wrote: post #107
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 t…

[deleted]
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