stale_cheetos

I'm a full-stack dev with 8 years experience mostly in startups. I was diagnosed about 5 years ago (at 32 years old), started on methylphenidate and moved to amphetamines 2 years ago. I've worked with legacy code very briefly and early on, and that experience is what made me want to seek out startups/new companies. That being said, I still come across convoluted spaghetti code or deeply nested UI components. I feel like it takes me a lot longer than my peers to gain a general understanding of what's going on, exactly as you describe. I keep a pen and notebook beside my keyboard at all times and in these situations I write/draw the structural heirarchy, logic flow, etc. While it takes me longer, I feel like my standard for "baseline" understanding is much higher and when I reach it, I have more understanding about the code in question than my peers.

...then I forget it after a week or so 😂

But really, writing/diagramming things really helps me. If physical writing isn't your thing you could try something like lucidchart or mermaid diagrams.

Same! Though I was very into Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. I don't always look back in fondness at my edgy Hot Topic years 😅

I have fond memories of playing through Super Metroid for the first time. The SNES was at my dad's house and my parents were separated so I only got to play every other weekend. A friend on my school bus was also playing and usually further along than me (he had his system at home) and he'd drop hints about locations of secret power ups and where to go next when I was stumped. The game world felt huge and full of adventure to me.

On those weeks away from the SNES I'd read through Nintendo Power and draw my own level maps for imaginary games inspired by the ones they'd publish for games like Wolfenstein 3D.

Visual Studio Code has this feature. You can define user snippets using a JSON format and create any alias you like for each. Then, when editing a document you just start typing the alias and press tab when it suggests the snippet (no mousing around required).

You can also create anchor points for variable content that you then tab through and fill out after inserting a snippet. If you find yourself using the same template for your writing this might be a helpful feature.

I’m bad at describing things, here’s some documentation: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets.

This is all out of the box with no plugins installed. Also, I’ll point out that although the docs are coding related, you can make these work for any type of writing.