[coldblues]

I definitely relate with the author a lot. I have ADHD and getting in the flow of programming feels like a monumental task that makes me feel extremely dumb.

I think the issue is that there are too many low-quality programming resources, and the author should have asked for help. You won't have a personal mentor for free, but there are dozens of people in support channels to help you learn, all you have to do is ask. So many people have helped me understand hard to grasp things, and I've been very fortunate to have people around with expertise that can teach me as well.

Doing programming these days is brutal. Layers and layers of abstractions and you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. My ADHD brain requires me to know why I need to do something, and how it happens. The more programming feels like math, where you just have to blindly follow steps, the worse I feel doing it. Thankfully, I've looked into many resources understanding how the hardware works, how memory works, how the CPU works, how the OS works. It's been a necessary foundation to make sense of anything. The bottom up approach was the only thing that kept me sane. People like Casey Muratori teach you how to program the right way.

[MattPalmer1086]

It's interesting you say that math is blindly following steps. I have the opposite experience, that math is an exploration of concepts and how they relate to each other - much like programming!

Blindly following steps, whether in math, programming or anything else, does indeed sound unrewarding.

[_istanbul_]

That's exactly my thought. "Blindly" following steps in Math or programming is rewarding only when used to solve bigger problems, to sort of free up working memory.