Being a Developer with ADHD

You might be wondering why I chose a spider and a spider web as the visual for this post. It’s because spiders usually don’t repair their webs—they build them again. Throughout my life, I’ve restarted things countless times because I believed I hadn’t done them perfectly. I blamed myself for that over and over again. But I’m done blaming myself. Instead, I’m apologizing to myself.

This post is about being a developer with an ADHD brain. Taking risks because they’re fun, constantly thinking about work, hyperfocus, and parallel thinking.

Most of the time, instead of building simple projects with ready-made solutions, I end up creating much bigger challenges for myself by rebuilding those systems from scratch as CRUD applications. Legacy systems and old code just don’t excite me. Designing an architecture from the ground up or solving a strange bug is far more appealing. I can spend hours inside a project, feeling as if I’m on an adventure all the way to the finish line.

There have been countless times when I started working on the frontend and found myself deep in the backend, or when I was fixing a bug and suddenly began redesigning the entire system. I often start building a single feature only to realize hours later that I’ve wandered into solving a completely different problem. My attention rarely stays in one place; one problem leads to another, and then another.

I don’t want to present this as some kind of success story, though. This is simply how my mind works, and for years I’ve been learning how to work with it instead of against it. This way of thinking lets me see architectures differently, approach problems from unconventional angles, and constantly chase the best possible solution.

The upside is that solutions most people wouldn’t even consider are sometimes the first ones that come to my mind. I can explore three or four different possibilities at the same time while solving a problem. The downside is that I sometimes follow those possibilities so far that I make the work much bigger than it needs to be. Instead of finishing a feature, I catch myself trying to make it better, only to end up solving an entirely different problem.

Maybe that’s why the projects I’ve built have never felt like simple to-do lists. Each one has felt like a puzzle to solve, a new world to explore. Sometimes that mindset has cost me time, but it has also taught me things I never expected to learn.

I used to think this was a flaw. Now I see it as simply the way I work. Instead of trying to change myself, I’m learning how to guide the way I think. Maybe I’ll never be perfect, but instead of always starting over, I’m learning to rebuild—just like a spider.