A couple of weeks ago, I'd been to a social gathering with my girlfriend all day. Overworked and overwhelmed by the mental effort required to socialize, I sat down at my desk in the evening and tried to gather myself and do something I knew how to do: build a tool to mitigate the raging exhaustion and confusion I'm left with after trying and failing to seem "normal" for an entire day. What came out, though, rather than a development plan, was a confused and scrambled mess of a short text interspersed with illustrations that I found to be reflective of my state of mind in that moment and, really, of the ADHD that I was diagnosed with as an adult and that I was at the time not taking any medication for. I decided to leave the text as-is.
I started out – I don't know why I'm writing this in English; pretentiously, you could say that I decided to long ago – I started out not with a plan, not with a goal, not with – with an ambition, really with a hole, a pit, something shaped like scribbles, my English is imperfect, my frontal lobe overworked trying to phrase, to frame any thoughts and emotions accurately and expressively start by writing tests by killing myself via killing it you will attain status by writing code, by going at it like you would any project but I don't do projects well, I do impulses define your db Kleppmann says you don't need scale just do everything with a relational database you can pump in data and worry about it later, how Clever! how marvelous! I wonder if you're starting to get off track and your text on ADHD is becoming too self-aware, too informed by what you've read, little as that is even talking about being informed is a funny choice of words in this context, how do you want to do this just do it build a requirements spec implement it in Python, worry worry about deployment later worry about everything later it's been seven years though
- Define a base set of requirements.
- Don't build out an entire set of formalized requirements; this isn't a corporate project. Just: What do you want to be able to do? in a few short sentences.
Pick a stack. I know you shouldn't do this, but my primary reason, and I'm sure, yours, for commencing on this project is to get to work with tech I'm not used to working with at work, so- Ok, so once you have that, what do you do? You know roughly which language you're the most comfortable writing with do everything only when the need for the thing arises meaning don't deploy before you need others to take a look at what you've built, even then, they might just check out your git repo if they're so inclined.
What is it that you're actually trying to build. Did you even mention?
You're building a tool, a desktop app, for jotting down notes pertaining to individuals. Because you're a piece of shit or that's what you used to think because of your AþHD you can't remember what people tell you about themselves, even important, serious stuff about people you love gets swept to the side. And I need to remember, I want to remember. I've wanted to remember for so long. So I'm building a tool that I can skim ahead of meeting someone so I'll remember, and I'll be logging new information on that individual regularly and I get sad just writing this out, but I feel it necessary.
Why not use off-the-shelf notetaking software for this, you may ask I hear my Dad asking because I want too much custom functionality, a list of functionality which for the time being amounts to storing infor mation on inter-personal relationships because I need to be better at remembering everyone's families, I feel so loved when people remember details about members of my family even having never met them (find a less awkward way of phrasing that).