Without one, none of them work
How my emotion, my learning, and my problem-solving hold each other up — and what that lens does to every project I touch.
The thread
The thread, for me, is this: without one, none of them work.
Emotion. Learning. Problem-solving. I used to think of them as three separate skills you could practise on their own. Emotional intelligence is one course; neuroplasticity is another; problem-solving is a third. Three subjects. Three textbooks. Three days of the week.
That is not how my brain has them organised.
For me, they are one system. If I cannot read my own emotional state, I cannot tell whether the wall in front of me is a technical wall or a me wall — and the fix is completely different for each. If I have not built the neuroplasticity to notice when a learning pattern is failing, my problem-solving will loop on the same wrong approach. If my problem-solving has no exit ramp into “stop, breathe, name what you are feeling,” I will burn the day on something a five-minute pause would have unstuck.
They are not three skills. They are one skill with three faces.
The mission lens
The way I think and view things is different from others. It shows in how I build and plan a project.
My first thought, always, before any code: who does this benefit? Not just for me. For the community at large. For my kids. For the tired mother who is so lost that she is not able to help her child who is struggling. For the child who is not heard and is falling through the cracks.
I do not pick projects because they would look good on a CV. I pick projects because someone I can picture would have an easier time if the project existed.
That sounds high-minded. It is just how I am built. I cannot think about an idea without thinking about the person on the other end of it. The autistic part of me builds the schema; the ADHD part of me holds all the people the schema might serve in my head at once; the mother part of me will not let any of them go.
The noticing lens
The mission lens tells me who I am working for. The noticing lens is what lets me actually serve them.
I notice the squiggles in code. The little red and yellow underlines that say “something is off here.” Most of the time the squiggle is right.
I notice when something is off on a webpage. The alignment that is two pixels wrong. The colour contrast that fails for the person I would have built the site for in the first place. The focus ring that disappears the moment a screen-reader user actually needs it.
I notice when a website is hard to read. Lines too long. Text too dense. Italics where the dyslexic eye trips. Colour relied on as the only signal, leaving colourblind users locked out.
The mission gives my care its direction. The noticing gives my care its equipment. One without the other is half a developer. Together they are the kind of developer I am trying to be.
What it costs me
I am not pretending the system runs smoothly all the time.
When I am coding and I run into an issue, I have to take a moment to stop and reflect on what I am feeling. Is this frustration? Is this anger? Am I happy that this worked, or sad that it worked but it was not me that figured it out? Am I tired and pretending I am still sharp? Am I stuck because the bug is hard, or stuck because I have not eaten in five hours?
Most people get this read for free. I have to pay for it, every time. The cost is the pause. The cost is the meta-step before the action.
The benefit is that when I do find the answer, it is mine. I know exactly what state I was in when I learned it. I know what I will look like next time the same shape of problem shows up. I am building a library of self-knowledge alongside the library of technical knowledge, and they reference each other.
What I am working on
The hardest part of this system, honestly, is making it legible to other people. Tech is a team sport. The pause I need to name what I am feeling is invisible to the person waiting on my reply in Slack. The library of self-knowledge I am building is in my own private vocabulary.
I will need to try that little extra harder to make sure I am understanding the people around me, and helping in a way that is conducive to the work environment. That is the next-decade project — translating the way my brain works into shapes the people I work with can read at a glance, without me having to over-explain or under-deliver.
I do not have this all figured out. I am writing this from the middle of the figuring-out, not from the other side of it.
If you are reading this and any of it lands — the without-one-none-work thread, the mission lens, the noticing, the costly pause before naming a feeling — I think you might be one of mine. And if you are a team lead reading this thinking about whether someone like me would fit on your team: the honest answer is that someone like me will work very hard for the people you build for, and will keep working on the parts that make it easier to work with the rest of the team.
The whole thing is one system. I would not trade it for anything.