When people ask me what my personal experience of adhd is, I describe it as being the worlds best street magician--except I'm also the mark--and I suck at making things reappear.
This feels like an unnecessarily derisive take on a blog post where the author seems to just be expressing a personal experience.
I read it as saying "this thing has some major limitations that forced me to slow down, which is actually valuable for me because I have ADHD. I didn't expect that and it's kind of neat, but who knows if that's actually valuable long term. Also here are some other details about the device imo"
As someone who also has pretty severe adhd, I relate to the idea that barriers to impulsivity can be really valuable and it was interesting to read about someone experiencing that unintentionally. It makes me feel more connected to the world of people like me. I didn't come away thinking they're suggesting I buy one because I have adhd, honestly, I came away being _less_ likely to get one because of the author's description of their experience.
It was just an experience another human found neat and wanted to put on their blog. I personally like when people feel comfortable and inspired to share like that.
I was primarily a SQL Server dev and worked in an analytics department supporting homedepot.com call centers. I personally did about half and half application work in C# and the kind of query writing/analysis/optimization you're talking about. It was stable, paid okay, and I was working with a good team (which can be a crapshoot obviously).
I'd personally look for stuff like that out of focused tech companies.
Otherwise I think meetups are a fantastic idea, especially when it comes to greasing the wheels around whatever trendy interview practices are going on that week and being able to personalize the context around wanting to stick with Oracle.
Just off-the-top spit-balling, but things like workforce management, analytics, etc are the kinds of things I'd start with.
I also did project based consulting on small teams for about five years and Oracle is all over the place in non-tech industry, so I wouldn't despair on that front. I'm not sure what the market is for that kind of job, but it's so fundamentally woven into the fabric of a lot of F500 and similar companies that it's not going away soon--even if some of them would prefer it to.
Yeah I think that such non-tech companies would be a perfect fit. Especially since they're the ones using Oracle still. The workforce management space is not something I'm familiar with so will definitely look into it, thanks for the input!
I appreciate what you're saying here, and that your comment is more tactful than others, but I also see why the the op would be frustrated with the responses.
The responses to far, to my subjective reading, imply that the OP did something stupid and that's why they were in that situation. Again, it's just a personal interpretation, but I don't think it's a far-fetched one, and I don't think we have the context to make that assumption.
I agree that it can be useful to highlight the possible pitfalls to readers, but it's my opinion that it could be done in a more empathetic and tactful way that highlights our collective lack of context while still providing general advice to readers. I also think it would tend to lead to a more nuanced and useful conversation for the same readers.
Yeah, I agree completely. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and to contribute to this community, that we all hold so dear, with a soft touch.
the `| % [property name]` is shorthand for pulling out some root level property on an object in the pipeline
(just for reference; not really trying to prove any point)
What I personally like about PS in this case is that the syntax of the operation feels very consistent with the rest of powershell, but that's not a dig against jq (I use it a lot when I'm on macos); just my subjective impression, and not an objective claim of quality.
> Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux
C# is not-so-secretly my favorite language (though Clojure is a close second) and I use it pretty often on macos/linux.
IDE wise have you given Rider a try? Imo it's a totally viable Visual Studio replacement for most C# dev, though not as nice for all workflows or related tech.
Worth looking at if you haven't. It's not free, though, so that can blow depending on your tolerance for licensing. I've personally had an all-products pass with jetbrains for awhile now, so doesn't bug me, but ymmv
I also get a lot of mileage out of C# notebooks in VSCode. Honestly, I use C# for a ton of my daily scripting because I built up so many utility scripts over the years in LINQPad on windows, and they were pretty trivial to port
Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile. No, I did not know of Rider, but next time that I get the C# itch again, I'll definitely be looking at what I've been missing out on!
Checking it out quickly, it's from JetBrains (a good sign for software quality) and has a 30-day trial so I'd know what I'm paying for. On the downside, ~175€ is quite steep given that it's not for a commercial purpose and I am currently fine getting my programming done in pluginless Vim. And that's not a one-time payment: that's for the first year. I can't just move on for a while and come back to expect to open up a project file and it to just work :/. I think this is not going to be for me at this price point, though the 30 days trial might be a challenge mode to start and finish a project that I might otherwise never finish at all!
Edit: And I wasn't even yet talking about your comment history. Spotted two insightful comments while skimming the top level of the first page of comments (I stopped there), and that already takes me all the way back to 2015. Not saying you must post more if you don't want to but e.g. the timer tip seems to have helped a lot of people :)
Just to clarify: when you buy you get a license for the current version that is yours to keep and then you get updates through the year, so you can drop back and use an older version if you don't want to keep paying.
Mind you I had the all products pack for a while now, so YMMV.
JetBrains makes damn good stuff. I do C# professionally and even though I use Visual Studio for the bulk of my work, it’s built in refactoring pales in comparison to what JB’s ReSharper provides. (Yes, VS has been catching up but it still has a long way to go.)
Anyway, yeah, Rider by itself isn’t cheap but for not a lot more you can just get the entire JB suite. It includes a whole ton of useful stuff that’s multi-platform and multi-language. When I’m doing Mac dev work, I find Rider to be much better for a lot of things than VS Mac is. (As long as I don’t need Azure integration.)
I could get my employer to reimburse it, but I find it all so useful both for work and for personal projects that I decided it was worth just paying out of pocket and not having to worry about it.
> Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile
Thanks! I really appreciate that. Been kind of a bummer year so it's nice to hear (#layoff problems, so I'm definitely not the only one, and I think that's looking up recently)
I don't think I'd get Rider by itself, either. I was doing consulting for awhile and ended up getting the jetbrains all product thing personally because was jumping between Goland, Rider, Webstorm, and Rubymine, and Datagrip a lot (I honestly don't remember which are paid now). I got it personally because I ended up using it so much. I ended up using CLion (which is paid) for learning Rust, too, which was nice.
definitely check out the 30 day trial. And 100% JetBrains knows what they're doing
Have to dip, but feel free to ask whatever questions and I'll check it out when I get back. No pressure either way.
FYI I tried CLion for Rust, but did not feel any improvement of experience in comparison to VS Code + Rust analyzer plugin, so I cancelled CLion. In fact, VS Code somehow felt better.
I do use Rider 50/50 with big Visual Studio though. Mostly because I feel that the need to eventually switch to Linux is creeping as Windows adds more junk.
I've heard the VSCode + Rust analyzer situation has gotten really good. I think this might have been when it wasn't as solid? I'll have to check out the VSCode situation again sometime.
The one thing I don't like about Rider vs Visual Studio + ReSharper is that ReSharper has some really advanced structural/semantic searches that haven't made their way into Rider. I don't use it a ton, but being able to do queries across the AST annotated with semantic/type info is really useful if you're working on a legacy C# project that's been copy pasted fifty times--once per state (actual thing that I ended up working on)
otherwise, Rider is rad, and I have way more intellij platform bindings and such setup for them all
Just wondering if you're talking about command name length or something else?
Asking because it comes up a lot and almost all the common commands have idiomatic short/terse versions (gci for Get-ChildItem, etc).
No shade, though. No reason you'd know if you don't have a reason to know it.
Would love to hear if I'm making the wrong assumption and it's something else you're talking about. I personally really love powershell, but also get why people love bash. I'm still pretty comfortable with bash because I work in *nix systems mostly, so it makes sense for me to know it, whereas the reverse (with ps) isn't really true for most devs
Yeah that's basically it, so thanks for mentioning abbreviations! I knew they had some aliases (e.g. ls, curl) but not that it was commonplace because any powershell tutorial uses the long form and capitalizes everything (indeed I don't interact with PS a lot). It all feels very design-by-committee. Not sure whether it's a good thing that guides never use the short form: long more readable, but the specific choices of words give me weird vibes and run off blog-width line lengths. OP shows that nicely with the bash version fitting on ~60% of the line (on my screen) but the PS version running out of the line.
A lot has been written about naming things and brevity versus clarity, and while I sit very firmly on the programmer's side as opposed to the math people side (single letter variable names, in weird fonts or languages if they (surprise!) run out of available letters), I think I am more of a bash person than a java person in terms of naming things. Word-ish commands like pushd, kill, read, etc. (taking some bash built-ins here as examples, rather than external programs which may be named arbitrarily) seem a lot nicer to me than either very long commands or acronyms where you basically still have to know the long form to remember it. I'd never have guessed that spps stands for stop-process yet that's the portable powershell form of 'kill' (just looked that one up).
I think this kinda shows the issue, and why I personally prefer ps (as someone who's bounced off bash and NEVER gotten the time to get decent at it, and who rarely needs to use any of these and never at any serious level, so massive grain of salt).
Kill is intuitive to you because you've probably been around tech your whole life, and tech has just used "kill" ever since. It's essentially as ubiquitous as "bug".
That said, if I had to teach someone brand new with next to no skills (the endless goal of making coding easier for the average person and so on), Stop-Process is a hell of a lot easier to teach, or rather, it's much easier to teach them to help themselves.
Since it follows the same naming template as every other powershell command, if you teach them how to use the basic commands like Get-Help/Get-Command, they're a hell of a lot more likely to figure it out themselves without needing assistance. You know that every cmdlet is verb-noun, and you know you're trying to stop a process, so something like
> Get-Command "*process*"
Gives you a short list that is extremely intuitive to figure out.
Now...for something as simple as "kill" you're not expecting a beginner to run a command with a wildcard search. You'll just tell them. But that entire philosophy is extremely helpful when you're in a situation where you do need to figure out the command and don't have the ability to just spend however many minutes on google, and if you teach PS right you get to a point where it's very easy to teach yourself.
Obviously how much this matters in a world of IDE's and search engines and now AI is questionable, but I think that if you redid bash today, it'd follow similar philosophies. Things like touch, grep, and arguably even echo really strike me as "favorites" just because of the inertia/ubiquity.
The convention is to use the short form whenever you are in a terminal for one-off commands, but go for the full name for script files that has to be maintained/read later — which is an absolutely sane policy in my opinion.
Bash is a write-only-full-of-bugs language, comparatively.
100% and I never thought of that before but I can see how you'd get that impression from tutorials.
The VSCode powershell extensions will also give you suggestion squigglies under all of your aliases in a saved script if they're not long-form, but I usually mix and match based on pragmatism.
My use of alias vs long-form usually comes down to two sort of situations:
* Ad-hoc at the shell: all aliases all the time (and make my own if I need to. welcome to my godless wasteland, population: me)
* Shared scripts: Just like any code, do what's idiomatic for the team. Usually it's largely aliases with some long-form
In practice I'd say the formatting consistency situation on teams isn't nearly as bad as SQL but obviously not as good as Go.
For reference, I'm also a huge APL fan, so hit me with arcane symbols in my free-time all day long, but definitely pragmatic balance at work.
I also don't even think of them as acronyms personally. The acronym just sort of means the semantic action in my brain at this point, but I think that's mostly a fluency thing, and can't really speak to it being hurtful/helpful since I'm so removed from when I first started learning it
Regarding not thinking of them as acronyms: yeah I get that. I was wondering how to best phrase that sentence because, indeed, curl also does not stand for C Uniform Resource Locator in my head, or grep for global regular expression perl-style (if I'm remembering that one correctly). It's just curl and grep. However, whereas curl and grep are really treated as names, spps I can currently regurgitate only by thinking of stop-process, and I imagine most such abbreviations will be like that for a while.
totally agree, and yeah, "you eventually memorize all the arcane bits" definitely isn't a point in favor of powershell
there are also some commands I use all the time that don't have built in aliases like the json converters, so that makes cross-machine alias consistency for some important things not great
It's just a knee-jerk reaction people have in any thread where powershell is mentioned. "Hur hur long command names." Doesn't bring anything to the discussion.
I can see where you're coming from, but to me it's not some meme or joke. I find it similarly annoying in Java, for example, and it makes me want to use that language less. Obviously it's only a small part of the whole consideration.
Every common command has a short alias, or often multiple short alias. Get-ChildItem => "ls", "gci". Get-Content => "gc", "cat". These aliases are standardized, you can look them up with Get-Alias (or "gal" ;) ).
It means that working in the terminal, you can use short commands, and when you write a long-term script, you use the long names so that the script is more readable.
What I find great is that flags also have aliases that are standardized across commands.
This is why I'm annoyed at this meme. It just stems from ignorance.
What’s long in Java? It sure longer than the absolutely insane C convention of snrcph whatever, but these AbstractFactoryFactory things are just memes - the Java convention is to prefer full words, but that’s the same in I believe the majority of languages - JS, Rust, Python all use basically identical names, at most casing differs.
Yeah, it can definitely be kind of a meme, but also I've never had a bad time bringing it up in good faith. A lot of people don't even realize it's a knee-jerk meme response to them. OP also doesn't seem to just be MS bashing, and I think there's a reality that the typical linux/macos dev just doesn't have a compelling reason to sink time into vetting PS, whereas I had a reason to learn it and ended up really digging it.
But I do get what you're saying and think it's a common meme that's often unhelpful
I love powerful. I've used it for a long and even though I primarily work on macos/linux now, I install powershell core on everything.
That said, I _started_ using it because I was working on a windows box doing C# and managing windows servers.
There's just not a compelling reason for a dev to learn it outside of personal interest, and I think that's a completely legit mindset, since we all have limited time. I'm even fine with misconceptions--we all have them about something--as long as the person is being a decent human about it (which is why I've enjoyed this thread/comments)
Even with the default short aliases like gci there are only ~100 unique commands/commandlets aliased and 600 commandlets in a default install. Not to mention what happens when you start loading other commandlets. Trying to predicate your usage of PS on just using short commands is also going to fall short in documentation and searches. I recommend just getting used to the fact command names are long. <tab> is a good friend too.
Often mentioned failing of powershell commands is that they went with Verb-Noun, when the reverse would have been much more discoverable. You want to specify what you want to operate on first, Get-<Tab> will be much less useful then Process-<Tab>.
Otherwise, despite their length I do like these long names, you can have aliases for ‘ls’ and alia, and flags fuzzy match.
lol, you know what's funny is that I actually used to have a script like that for windows 10.
I volunteered to help a local nonprofit image a bunch of laptops and they'd bought win 10 home licenses for something like 30 laptops. The whole thing was kind of a nightmare but got most of the adware stripped out, I think, but not all of it. been awhile, so hard to remember
Kind of unrelated to the app, but wanted to share a related thought that's been useful to me over the years in case it's useful for anyone else.
I have pretty strong ADHD. Pomodoro and other time tracking techniques never really worked well for me long-term because they end up being associated with a lot of anxiety and self-shame as I used them, so I tend to stop using them as negative feelings build up.
Now I use them differently. I'll set the timer for 30 - 45 minutes and when it goes off I ask myself if I'm using my time in the way I intended. I try to ask it in a non-judgmental way and the answer is mostly unrelated to the process. Sometimes it's fine that I got off on a tangent; sometimes it's not. The goal is really just to be aware that time is passing and have built in moments where I'm conscious of how it's being used.
When I'm consistent about it (which isn't always), I find that I'm much more aware of how I'm actually using my time, which tends to lead toward naturally using it better but again, I try to separate the awareness from the tracking and planning.
I like that one because I enjoy the physical feeling of rotating it. I also like that the alarm is the light blue backlight flashing, which feels less aggressive and psychologically traumatic than my phone alarm.
That's also not to say pomodoro is bad for someone with adhd. I still use similar methods and I think there are techniques for being more successful with it that I wasn't employing. I just like to separate the time/task management from time awareness now and feel that it's useful for me.
To be honest, nothing really works for me except medications. like i have a spare smartphone that's running my pomodoro timer, but if it's a task that interests me i will blow past every 5min pause and anything else because im focused on the task that interests me on hours end, like i would program in my head while drive home, but if the task is boring that i don't want to do i can have 100 timers it would not help. like for example i have to fill a form and send it that would return me 17k in overpaid taxes i did not do it for last 4 months. there is X amount of those task that no amount of timers would help me do it. i fucking hate my adhd in that without medications im a zombie. the only thing that i can hope without medications is find interesting problems. that's also shit when you have a family because you cannot turn of, because you are dealing with the interesting problem all the time and it consumes you. my brain is great in resolving big challenges, but the worst at doing daily tasks.
I very much relate to this (or at least parts of it; everyone's relationship with their own adhd is very specific and personal).
I was medicated as a 90s kid, then went a long time without being medicated. It took awhile to get medicated again and a longer time to be okay with it as a part of my life instead of constantly trying to wean myself off of it because of lingering stigmas around medications and mental health.
The timer for me is 100% in conjunction with meds and other life strategies for managing my ADHD and honestly, even then it feels crippling at times, especially since I've been laid off. Without the day-to-day structure of a job, my brain feels like a tornado in fog a lot of days.
Context is another big one for me. I don't do well working from home, so if I have a remote job I rent a small office. Part of it is having "work context" and part is just the fact that I don't have a VR headset, a thousand books on random hobbies, ten unbuilt lego sets, and a shelf of books on elm, clojure, idris, or whatever random language I'm interested in that week.
Anyhow, what you're saying makes a ton of sense. I feel like the timer thing just helps me specifically with even being aware of time at all, but I really find that coping mechanisms for adhd are super varied.
Appreciate you contributing your own experience, though, and highlighting that it's not as simple as one or two life hacks
I was in similar situation. From my experience a lot of people for whom timers, to-do lists, blockers etc. don't work react positively to body doubling (i.e. doing a task in presence of another person). Have you tried it? It's the only method that works for me (granted, I haven't tried meds yet, I'm at the end of diagnosis process).
Love this comment. I suffer from some of the same problems and feelings.
One weird thing that works me is playing reality TV in the background (love and hip hop, vanderpump ect). Seems to have really calming effect on my brain which lets me focus on work. I've realized over the years that my adhd is just suppressed anxiety in disguise and reality TV masks it.
A cognitive psych professor of mine couldn't work without music playing to 'occupy a certain part of his brain', almost always prog rock. Didn't seem to be holding him back - sometimes a mask is a workable solution. :)
Some things (code, writing docs) I can only do them with music in the background, usually music that is either downtempo, instrumental or both (for the most part Pink Floyd, Sting, Mogwai, Morcheeba or several jazz/fusion artists).
Without music it 10x harder for me to get those activities going.
I do the same thing, although I typically put on something lightweight that I’ve seen before, like a season of Parks & Rec. It’s interesting to see someone else with this specific experience, I always used the analogy of “picking up the slack”.
If I am engaging in rote work that doesn’t require much creativity or doesn’t fully engage my mind, then part of my attention tends to wander. It might not lead to total distraction, but it does produce an uneasy feeling I describe as anxiety.
I always imagined that music can serve a similar function in others, but I believe that my having been a musician (and a serious one when I was younger) causes me to engage a little too deeply into whatever music is playing, so it’s a little too active for me.
I had a period where I’d play old episodes of Mr. Rogers while working.
When one of my kids was an infant, the only thing that would get him back to sleep in the middle of the night was watching shows like House Hunters on HGTV.
Something about the chill vibe, people interacting kindly and relatively quietly, nice scenery, no music or sound effects, longer durations without cuts.
Contrast this with, say, Sports Center on ESPN, where it’s a constant blitz on the senses.
thanks for the positive feedback! I'm not as quick to engage as I once was and I appreciate it
I usually can't do any background noise with a pattern but there are a handful of albums I've listened to hundreds of times while working over the years in the same way I think you're talking about. I ended up finally ripping them from old cd's because every year Spotify would tell me that I basically no other music mattered to me in comparison ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also listen to mynoise.net (a gem of the internet) pretty often. Over the years a few of their tracks have become mentally associated with a sort of calm productivity for me
Honestly the ADHD focus ones are kind of random because they're sort of just albums I happened to be listening to at the point in my life when I finally started doing programming professionally (I def still like them though)
These are the ones I listen to the most when I'm programming. I'll flip through them depending on my mood at the moment:
Tool - Lateralus
Don Ross - Klimbim
Axiom of Choice - Niya Yesh
Axiom of Choice - Unfolding
Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale - Breathing Underwater
They're just sort of cooked into my brain at this point
Oh, there's also an album of Harpsicord music that I used to listen to at cafes because for whatever reason the Harpsicord drowns out voices really well (for me at least). I can't remember what it is now, though. I mostly use mynoise.net cafe tracks for that now
Wow, I've known that album since 2009? 2010? and never seen anyone else ever mention it. Curious if you remember how you found it?
I ask because the way I found it was odd enough that it sticks with me...
I was helping a friend in high school with their computer. I went to a boarding school without much internet and all the kids traded music on thumb drives. Windows Vista was new in our parts, and this girl's laptop was one of the first ones running it that I'd had access to. Asked her if she had any interesting music and she said not really, but there were some sample tracks that had come with the computer. So she gave me the Vista sample pack haha.
My favorite track was Karsh Kale's Distance, listened to it a lot. Later (months later, on vacation) looked the guy up to see if he'd made more like it. Didn't really click with the album Distance was from, but Breathing Under Water made the cut into "albums I remember to this day" (and I too have ADHD).
Nice! Yeah, it's kind of random, but less random than how you ran across it, I think.
I have a friend who's a drummer, and at some point in the early 2000's he picked up a tabla (a type of indian drum--sounds like something you're probably familiar with). I was really fascinated by tabla and started looking into more indian music, which led to listening to Ravi Shankar. I think I mentioned that to the same friend who told me about Anoushka and loaned me a copy of Breathing Under Water.
I haven't actually listened to any Karsh Kale, but I'll have to check it out.
I think that's also why I ended up listening to Table Beat Science (which I forgot to mention before).
Another more random album totally unrelated to those that I really like:
Iarla Ó Lionáird - I Could Read The Sky
It's more irish folksy inspired but has a vibe I always really liked. I used to sometimes just pick a random CD at the local music shop that I'd never heard and buy it. I think that's how I found that pme. That's also how I ended up with the four cd play-them-all-at-once flaming lips album(s) zaireeka. In retrospect, sort of an adhd thing to do, lol
I don't listen to tool a ton anymore. I still like their stuff and think they're a talented band but just don't get the urge often, except for Lateralus.
Some of it is just happenstance, I think, but something about that album's energy and vibe can help me intentionally get into a steamroller of hyperfocus on work problems. It's honestly sort of draining for me? So I don't do it a lot. I can honestly say that I've listened to that album many hundreds of times at this point, so my brain long since stopped latching onto the patterns and lyrics.
For some reason I've never sat down and listened to Aphex Twin, which feels weird now. I'll have to check them out more intentionally.
MacOS can announce the time every 15, 30, or 60 minutes. I've used it in the past. It's kind of like a metronome for my day. I think I'll try turning it back on. :)
System Settings > Control Center > Clock > Clock Options
For me, The act of starting the pomodoro timer itself was the chore, I think being contextually aware of pomodoro timer was a drag to me.
So I fixed that by creating a butt triggered timer which starts when I sit on my chair and reminds me to get off the chair after 25 mins and triggers the break timer when I do. The whole process is un-attended and I didn't have to be aware of the timer at all.
Then I went overboard and built a game around it using WASM & what not[1] which defeated the whole purpose of me not having to be aware of the timer, So I again went back to the basics and built a new Simple Butt Mover[2] which I use regularly now with huge quality of life improvement.
P.S. Congratulations to OP for the launch of their Pomodoro timer.
I’ve been getting into wearing and collecting not that expensive wrist watches as a hobby to help feel more connected and aware of time and it’s been a great and enjoyable thing for me! Along the lines of you comment
That's a super interesting idea. Make the newness a thing you constantly rotate on purpose.
It reminds me of recently thinking that my clothes are only neatly folded after I learn a new way to fold them, so maybe I should just invent one every week, lol--which feels a little less tenable than the watch idea
Really cool way you're coopting the novelty like that
"test your explanations!
...running an explanation by a few people who don’t already know the concept helps to catch incorrect assumptions I’ve made."
I love this.
As I get more skilled with a thing I think I can have more confidence that I'm doing it well and according to best practices up front but that my highest level of confidence comes from employing the thing in practice and observing the results.
That could be deploying code to prod with monitoring, having another dev review my code to see if it's readable, having users interact with my system while I observe, or in this case seeing if someone can read my explanations and understand the ideas I'm trying to communicate.
probably some nostalgia there but great memories