Abbey Perini: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Abby, and I’m here today to talk to you about coding and A DHD where we excel. A DHD is defined as Attention deficit hyperactivity Disorder in the DSM five, which is the current diagnostic manual for mental health professionals in the United States. I and many others have said Attention Deficit is a horrible name for this disorder.

Attention regulation would probably be a better name. I have plenty of attention. It’s focusing that attention on what I should be focusing on that I struggle with. So attention regulation would probably cut down on those questions like why do they have enough attention for video games but not chores?

The DSM five defines three subtypes and attentive hyperactive slash impulsive and combined type. I have combined type, which means that I get symptoms from the other two types. And disorder is an important part of this name disorder. As defined in the DSM five is kind of like it’s causing you and or [00:01:00] the people around you so much distress that you need help for it.

So yes, everyone loses their keys every once in a while, but if you lose your keys like every day or multiple times a day, that’s a problem that you might need help for. I already had a psychology degree by the time I got diagnosed, so I approached processing my diagnosis through that lens. I had the DSM five as a framework, and I had participated in research on how stigma prevents people from seeking mental health help while I was earning that degree.

So I lived my life in a way that shines light on shame, including talking about and writing about my mental health struggles. So I started writing a six part series on. A DHD and coding. I started in much the same way that I’m starting this talk. I talked about how it’s an executive function disorder at its core, so we struggle with all the things that the big front part of your brain controls called executive function, which includes things like willpower, how many things we can think [00:02:00] about at once.

Emotional control, starting tasks, planning tasks, managing your time. How many or how easily you can switch between tasks and organization and all of this creates an interest based motivation system. It’s not important space. It doesn’t matter if my house is gonna burn down, if I don’t do the task, if it’s not novel, the right amount of challenging, stimulating, fascinating, and or inherently interesting to me in some way, I’m gonna struggle to do the task.

The best metaphor I have for this is will they press the button if there’s no reward, or God forbid a. Bad consequence from pressing the button. I’m gonna struggle to press the button if there’s an okay reward for pressing the button. I’m still gonna struggle to press the button. If I don’t know what reward is associated with the button, I’m still gonna struggle to press the button.

But if there is a great reward, I’m gonna press that button as many times as physically possible. So I broke the rest of the series down into four parts. Can’t start, can’t keep going. Can’t stop and can’t remember. These are the areas that I feel that I struggle with any task, but [00:03:00] especially a coding task.

And I mapped each category to symptoms and tips and tricks. The biggest trick of all being that all the tricks are gonna stop working, so you have to rotate through them. Can’t start. I thought that had a lot to do with procrastination and time blindness and rejection sensitive dysphoria. I struggle a lot with criticism and can’t keep going.

I thought it had a lot to do with frustration and fidgeting and sustaining focus and can’t stop. I thought I had a lot to do with hyper focus time blindness and rumination and can’t remember. I felt it had to do with distractibility and poor working memory and organization. And at that point I was inundated in comments.

Comments from people saying they felt less alone. They were finally going to get accommodations they needed because they had shown the series to their coworkers and they had always thought that they were just bad at things, but this was them to a T and they were finally going to get help. It has been years since I wrote the [00:04:00] series, and I’m still getting messages.

And if I’ve forgotten to respond to you, I’m so sorry. I appreciate every single one. And that’s also the the time that I realized that I was doing what everyone does to people with A DHD. And that was telling them that there’s a productivity bar and they weren’t meeting it. It’s estimated that children with A DHD received 20,000 more negative messages by age 10.

So I added a six part that I hadn’t anticipated adding called Where We Excel. You may be surprised to see distractibility is the first thing on there because if you. Came to this top knowing, one thing about A DHD is probably that we’re distractible. It’s part of can’t stop, can’t keep going and can’t remember.

But we are distractible because we’re absorbing all of the information. While your brain may filter out information like how the sun is filtering through the room right now and the sounds of all the electronics around me and anything sensory stimuli around me. Our brains don’t. [00:05:00] But that means that we are absorbing information that other people don’t, which means we make connections and recognize patterns that other people don’t.

And we’re great at systems thinking, which means when the toaster breaks, we don’t just think about the toaster. We also think about the power cord and the power outlet, and is the power working, which makes us great at full stack. I know people who can’t start tickets. Until they know the context of how the ticket fits into the system, and we’re so, so creative.

Part of this may be hyperactivity. If you can think more thoughts per second, you can probably come up with more ideas. We’re constantly brainstorming. We reject the status quo. I’ve never met someone with A DHD who accepted. We’ve always done it this way as a good reason to keep doing it that way. I once had a senior come to me and say, Abby, I survived without documentation.

The rest of us survived without documentation. And I said, that’s not a rule. That doesn’t mean I have to, and he chuckled and had to admit that I was correct. We’re the definition of thinking outside the box. I have a meme here that has two superheroes looking at planes, and those planes are labeled with frameworks for generating ideas like [00:06:00] brainstorming sessions.

And one of the superheroes looks back at the other one and says, look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power. Some of this is hyperfocus, and hyperfocus is a double-edged sword. Hyperfocus is the struggle to pull our focus away from something that we’re interested in, and that’s driven a lot. By curiosity, we don’t stop to ask if it’s hard or if we should be learning it right now.

We’re willing to work long hours on things that naturally interest us, and it leads to just one more thing. One of the reasons I got diagnosed is my husband came home and I would’ve been coding for eight hours straight, no breaks, and he’d ask. When’s the last time you took a break? And I’d say, I don’t know, but I am gonna try just one more thing before I stop.

All of this led to in interviews, me being called the passionate programmer, when in reality like Danny Donovan’s comic here about the graveyard of abandoned hobbies. I’m passionate about anything that seizes my interest, and I will go all in on that until it loses its novelty and challenge, and then I’ll move on to the next thing.[00:07:00]

And some of this is going down rabbit holes. We wanna know how it works. Danny Don calls it the A DHD urge to whip out your phone and Google everything because unanswered questions make your brain itchy. And this is just you. You ask a question and you get an answer, and that answer generates another question, and that question generates another answer, and that answer generates another question, and so on and so forth until you’ve spent 30 minutes researching a small quirk about.

JavaScript, which has come in handy when I’m troubleshooting above all these things together make us excellent at troubleshooting bugs. We know a little bit about a lot of things thanks to those rabbit holes. We think about the whole system. We’re creative. We don’t stop to have it ask if it’s hard. We always wanna try one more thing.

And I have a story about a senior who we were troubleshooting, uh, AWS. Stopped deploying our next JS site as it does. And we had tried everything in the official documentation. We had tried everything in old documentation. We had tried everything. And I had found one thing in a thread that we had no idea why it would [00:08:00] work.

And I was like, let’s try it. And I know she was at the end of a rope because she was willing to try it. And we tried it and it worked. And I think she’s still mad that she doesn’t know why it worked. But we’re, we’re ready. We are ready with ideas and things to try always, there’s always just one more thing.

And this slides for my managers. We’re easy to reset and reward for reset. We’re distractible. We can’t remember. If you don’t remind us, we’re probably not gonna get upset about it again. And sprints and tickets work. Great for the way that our brains work. Everything’s already prioritized and broken down, and once the sprint or ticket is over, we get something new, which is inherently rewarding for us.

That novelty and the coding puzzles, if we like coding, that’s inherently rewarding and we’re very susceptible to praise because of all of the negative messaging we’ve gotten. So yes. If your brain is not built for the way that the world is built, excuse me, if the world is built for other types of [00:09:00] brains, then you are going to run into daily struggles.

But that doesn’t mean that the way you think. It can’t be a boon. So celebrate being a firework in a world that wants you to be a cube. Here’s where you can get these slides as well as the full series and ways to contact me if you would like. Thanks.