Publication : return to attention deficit disorder strategy

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~ return to attention deficit disorder strategy

Programmers sometimes suffer from having multiple projects they are working on, and they end up in an A.D.D. like situation or A.D.H.D like situation.

One strategy, simple, but often works, is to simply cycle back to the project you want to focus on (i.e. one that will succeed the most, or the one you really want to complete, but were bored with for a while).

How does the cycle or "Return to" work?

You get bored of working on one project, so you work on some others. This is bad.. as your main focus is now at risk. Your old project is abandoned for possibly weeks. Just make sure that you cycle back to it, by, possibly connecting the projects in some way: you write an algorithm in your side project (non main focus), and then this algorithm reaps its way or seeks its way back into your main original project.

You can also write modules for your main project that are sort of violating your main focus, but still a module that will end up in your project.

i.e. say you are just bored or tired of working on the main project, but you find some particular algorithm fascinating which seems to have nothing to do with your project, so oops, there goes the A.D.D. Well, as long as some how you can find a way to bring this algorithm back into the project and use it, your a.d.d. now becomes your advantage: although a risk, that your project will have too many side modules, that have little to do with the project.

I suppose a project like Emacs is a fucking a.d.d. nightmare, if not a super a.d.h.d joke... Someone got super tired of writing the main text editor module, so they unleashed their massive psychiatric issue of horrid a.d.d, and starting going off and writing multiple shits (plugins/emacs lisp modules) that had absolutely nothing to fuck all do with the text editor: like a psychology plugin for emacs, where you can make emacs talk shit about your psychological problems with some kind of nasty half assed a.i. engine. Or then you have the Tetris plugins available for other editors like notepad++, and indeed there is likely a gay one for emacs too. Probably some shit text based tetris farce going on in emacs: I couldn't care to research it, as that would be an a.d.d. thread spawning off, and I'm in full control of my own a.d.d. threads, AFAICT.

So, we are back to the problem that a.d.d. can be a nasty illness that causes fucktards to write text based tetris plugins for shit editors, but if you can at least use your a.d.d. for something productive, I'm with you, and I support you. Just don't use it for too many retarded modules.

If you can modularize your a.d.d., you might actually complete some of those modules. If they are small modules, or small demos, or small prototypes, you even have a greater chance of completing them... Or you can even work on some test cases that show the use of some functions. Just don't go ape shit crazy and test the entire app from the ground up, because we all know there are zillions of tests to write and never enough time to complete even one hundredth of all the tests.

Say you find an area of an API interesting to work with particularly: spawn your a.d.d. magic (previously known as a disease) and work with just that area of the API, while your main app suffers from not getting finished. So as long as that particular area of the API will find its way back into your app, you just modularized one area of your app away and used your a.d.h.d or a.d.d. magick to complete an area of research you may have never completed, if you tried to focus on the huge monolithic bloat called your main app (like, i.e. an emacs shitpile or a entire massive kernel).

Then there is of course the option of hiring some people (thread the work out, or coroutine it) to other people. If you can't focus on a particular area of your app or you are not an expert at it, hopefully you could pay someone to work on it for you, while you spawn off your own a.d.d. thread to work on something else.

Just make sure it's not an emacs shitpile of infinite modules that don't actually have anything to do with the main app or the kitchen sink: like those retarded tetris text based plugins which likely have nothing to do with text editing, so what the fuck are they doing in the text editor?

So as long as your a.d.d. and a.d.h.d. remain healthy and prosperous, I'm with you. If it becomes unhealthy, then try a bounty or getting someone else to work on stuff you cannot complete.