On a solo project there's no one down the hall to hand a problem to, and often the work of explaining it well enough for someone else to help costs more than solving it alone.
Building a better alerting system solved the problem of checking machines that didn't need checking. It didn't touch the reflex to flinch at every sound my phone makes, or the assumption underneath it that more reachable is always better.
A plain account of how ADHD shows up in the way I build: the pull of hyperfocus, the friction before boring tasks, and why external structure works better for me than willpower.
I run a mental ledger of what I shipped each day, and unscheduled hours read as debt against it — here's why that math is wrong, and what changed once I stopped treating downtime as something to earn.
The romantic version of building alone is independence and control. The daily version means deciding you were right without anyone else in the room.
Imposter syndrome doesn't disappear once you've logged enough years in a room full of people who remember exactly how many you've logged. It just gets quieter and easier to carry.
Automation quieted the alerts. It never touched the part of me that keeps listening anyway.
The habits that make for good engineering stories, working alone, being the only person who can fix something, carry a cost that rarely gets mentioned next to them. This opens a two-week series about that cost, from someone who is not a mental health professional and isn't offering treatment advice.
Starting in July, I'm posting here every day for two months, mostly about NOGnet, Magatama, the LLM Gym, and the NOG world. I don't know yet if I'll actually keep it up, and that's fine.
A few honest words for the person I was walking into my first Network Operator Group meeting, convinced everyone else already knew each other and I was the only one who didn't.