标签：#mentalhealth

We all hear about "Not comparing yourself to others" and that "comparing yourself is the thief of joy". To be honest, I agree and it's strange that I am contradicting myself because I compare myself A LOT. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that we have a natural tendency to compare ourselves. It's a human thing to do. The issue is that we tend to be very excessive over comparing ourselves to others to the point where it takes a toll on us. For example, we are demotivated to see someone's success because we believe we can't reach the goal they are in. We all have jealousy. Big or small. Even where I am at right now, I am still jealous that many people I know that got into big tech companies like Microsoft. To get more context, I want to share a story with you. Story Time Back in the day, I remember it was the year of the ACT. For those who don't know: It's a Standardized test that is needed for the college admissions to determine if you are admitted to their program. I remember I got a national average of 21 as my composite score and I was proud of the score I got since it's the national average during that time. However, I remember the day where my friends talked about the ACT. The most common thing I heard was: "Oh I got a 30" "I got a 32" "Man I got a 35, it was sooo easy" Hearing that makes me feel not only bummed out, but felt left out. I was feeling that I wasn't smart enough to be in the group. What's worse is that they got accepted into colleges and programs that are well known. Then they start boasting about their accomplishments. I felt like I am the odd-one-out because of my scores and their accomplishments I could not match. Why am I Talking about this? Looking back and knowing where they are at now, I am proud of who I become today. It's not that they have fallen downhill (they are still successful), but the route they have taken that I definitely could not follow. For example, on GitHub, many people fill up their contribution graphs to the

There is a kind of loneliness that does not always announce itself. It can be quiet. Heavy. Hidden behind a smile. It can make someone feel as though no one truly understands what they are carrying. Dear Stranger was created for those moments. It is a place where someone can pause. Breathe. Read. Feel less alone. And maybe, just maybe, carry a little more hope than they came with. This is not just a project to me. It is a quiet promise. A small place I built with my heart. A space where words can travel gently across distance and still carry comfort. I built Dear Stranger because I believe that even the smallest page can hold something powerful: hope, clarity, warmth, and the feeling of being understood. What I Built Dear Stranger is a web experience designed to feel intimate, human, and deeply personal. It is a space where someone can open a page written by a stranger, read something honest, and feel, even for a moment, that they are not alone. The project is built like a book made of feelings. It invites the visitor to step into a calm, reflective experience where words matter more than noise. They can read pages that speak to comfort, strength, peace, and hope. They can save what touches them. They can leave behind their own words for someone else to find one day. It was never meant to be just another website. It was meant to feel like a page that was waiting for you. Demo The experience is best felt by opening it and letting it meet you where you are. It is meant to be soft, reflective, and quietly powerful. Dear Stranger - this is for you. Code The project is built with Next.js and designed as a personal, story-like interface where emotion is part of the experience. The structure allows users to move through a reading journey, interact with meaningful content, and leave behind something sincere. Konarksharma13 / Dear-Stranger Dear Stranger — A Page for You This website was never meant to be just another page on the internet. It is a quiet place made for the hea

We just opened the waitlist for Something, and the part that surprised me most while building it wasn't the multi-agent orchestration — it was how hard it is to make an AI actually disagree. Every model we tested defaults to being helpful, which in practice means agreeable. Even when explicitly prompted to "find flaws," the outputs would soften into "here are some considerations" instead of a real critique. We had to engineer around this specifically: Separate system prompts with opposing reward framing — one agent optimizes for identifying growth potential, the other is explicitly told its only success metric is surfacing a disqualifying flaw Structured output forcing a verdict, not a summary — the skeptic agent (Nothing) has to commit to a specific weakness category (unit economics, timing, technical feasibility) rather than hedging across all of them A reconciliation step where both outputs get merged into one conviction score, so the founder isn't just reading two contradictory paragraphs If anyone's built adversarial agent setups and hit the same "it just wants to agree with me" problem, curious how you solved it. [Everyone who has a brain is a founder here] something-waitlist.vercel.app

Some of you may have noticed I disappeared a bit from the community over the last couple of weeks....

To start off, I appreciate the community support I have received on the post about being behind. I am behind, and I can't prove it but does it matter? Achievement that feels shallow on paper FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ Follow Jun 22 I am behind, and I can't prove it but does it matter? # discuss # community # mentalhealth # career 149 reactions 89 comments 4 min read I couldn't respond to every single one because of the overwhelming comments I have received! Rest assure, I will respond to each and every one of you and I am glad to be part of this community! With that said, I want to return the favor to the community about something important. I recently talked to @georgekobaidze and @codingwithjiro in the Virtual Coffee group about life in general. What I notice about our conversation how we ended up talking about regrets and how we should have done this and that. For example, we talked about not networking or not doing beyond the coursework at our University/College because of how non-social we are. Of course, we all have regrets like these and we improve overtime. As we kept the conversation going, there is something that comes down to the root based on the conversations we have and conversations I had overall. One side is that we have regrets and as a result, we improve. We self-reflect on our wants and needs and we improvise from there. For example, for me, I never did networking because of the fear of what other people thinks. I slowly realized that 99% of the irrational thoughts never comes true. Even if it does, I know myself that I could handle the situation. As a result, I took small steps and joined dev.to. We all know where I am at now XD On the other hand, there are people who identifies these regrets they have, but does not act on it. It has become common to college students who says that the "Job Market is Cooked" and that "They are not good enough". To be fair, impostor syndrome is real and yes, the job market is coo

TL;DR Tech has taught me many things over the years. It taught me how to learn new technologies, build projects, apply for opportunities, and keep growing. What it didn't teach me was something that turned out to be just as important: how to take care of myself while doing all of those things. For a long time, I believed I would slow down later. Later, when life became less busy. Later, after the next project. Later, after the next opportunity. The problem was that "later" never seemed to arrive. It took an unexpected pause in my own life to realize that building a successful career means very little if we forget to take care of the person trying to build it. Looking back, I don't see that experience only as a difficult chapter. It changed the way I think about success, growth, and what it means to build a career that's sustainable. Today, I still love learning, building, writing, and chasing opportunities. None of that has changed. What has changed is the realization that taking care of myself isn't something separate from my career. It's one of the reasons I'll be able to keep building it for years to come. Along the way, I also realized that many of the things that truly support us are easy to overlook. Rest, movement, nourishing ourselves well, meaningful relationships, and simply checking in on the people around us often receive far less attention than the next framework, project, or milestone, even though they make everything else possible. More than anything, I wanted to write this because I care deeply about this community. I hope none of us have to wait until life forces us to slow down before remembering to take care of ourselves. I hope we build careers we're proud of, but I hope we also build lives we're able to enjoy. This isn't an article about productivity or health advice. It's simply a reflection on something I wish I had understood earlier. Your career matters. So does the person building it. I'd also love to hear your story. Has there been a momen

TLDR: The most powerful AI on the planet, only a few days of access. Maximize it. I'd first like to give credit where it's due: @trickell - Thank you for sharing Network Chuck's youtube video with me. The reference video is found here guys if you missed it: Network Chuck's Video on Fable I first started by creating a nice template for tech documentation for personal use. It created a beautiful piece of work in about 5 minutes - something I could easily expand on in the future. Here is what it generated for me with after a one or two careful prompts: Clean UI, Easy Navigation! Created this personal reference guide for studying for CCNA (Network Chucks Summer of CCNA) Wanna see it? It lives here: Techdocs But after learning about the true span of Fable's power, I started asking the serious questions, the ones that are life-changing. How can I increase my quality of life based on my resume, experience, and current life circumstances? I wrote about 2 pages of life issues that needed fixing - you know the stuff that slowly eats away at your soul, like student loan debt and people that are challenging to work with? Yes - I told it my biggest issues and instructed it to give me actionable plans that are free or low-cost. Even fable told me that this was a lot. 😅 Getting Organized Knowing the scope of my own problems I knew that my thoughts and processes had to be organized. Luckily for me, I remembered I had a good place to do that. A place that Fable could connect to and place documentation in place for me with checklists, notes, summaries and actionable plans. That app is called Notion, and some of you may have heard of it. No one is going to organize your life for you, no one, except for AI I couldn’t think of a better place for lightning fast critical life-admin documentation on the spot. And I can tell you, this integration works like a charm, and I highly recommend it. For a busy person with a million ideas, this is great. Anxiety Relief I had a tremendous amount of

Every meditation app I have tried wants something from me. Headspace wants me to maintain a streak. Calm wants me to listen to a Daily Jay. Insight Timer wants me to join a group. One after another, apps designed to reduce my stress started creating new forms of it. The Feature Trap Here is what happened to meditation apps between 2015 and 2026: 2015: "Just meditate 10 minutes a day." 2018: "Track your streak! You do not want to break it, do you?" 2021: "Compare your stats with friends. See who meditated more this week." 2024: "AI-generated personalized guided meditation based on your emotional state, delivered at the optimal time based on your circadian rhythm." Wait — was not the whole point to stop optimizing everything? Subtraction as a Feature I switched to OneZen last month. Here is what I noticed: No onboarding. Open the app. Breathe. Close the app. That is the entire user flow. No streaks. I missed three days last week and the app did not shame me. It did not even notice. It just opened to the same calm screen, waiting, as if three days was the same as three hours. No gamification. No XP points. No badges. No "you are in the top 14% of meditators this month." Because meditation is not a competition you can win. What Subtraction Feels Like The first week was uncomfortable. I kept checking if I had "done it right." There was nothing to check. No dashboard. No stats. Just me and my breath. By week two, something shifted. Meditation stopped being a task on my to-do list and started being... just breathing. I was not practicing to maintain a number. I was practicing because it felt good. This is what minimalism actually means. Not fewer pixels. Less cognitive load. Less obligation disguised as features. The Bigger Idea OneZen's philosophy applies far beyond meditation apps: The best productivity tool is the one with the fewest notifications. The best social network is the one that respects when you leave. The best habit tracker does not exist — because the ha

Let's be fair. The title of this post is confusing at first, but once you read it in full, I hope you...

For years I treated burnout as a personal failing. If I was tired, I needed more sleep. If I was anxious on Sunday night, I needed to meditate. If I dreaded standup, I needed a better attitude. None of it worked, because I was treating an organizational problem as a character problem. Senior engineer burnout rarely looks like simple exhaustion. It looks like your pull request reviews getting slower. It looks like tech debt you keep meaning to document and never do. It looks like every "quick question" landing in your DMs, because you are the person who knows where everything is. The load is structural. You cannot meditate your way out of an org chart. Here is the framework that finally helped me, and that I now keep as a runbook. First, diagnose: acute or systemic A rough sprint is not burnout. A hard quarter is not burnout. Those are acute, and they resolve when the spike passes. Systemic burnout is different. The recovery never comes, because the structure that caused it never changes. You finish the death-march launch and the next one is already scheduled. You clear the queue and it refills by lunch. The mistake is applying acute fixes (a long weekend, a vacation) to a systemic problem. You come back rested, the structure grinds you down again in two weeks, and now you also feel like the rest "did not work," which makes it worse. A quick self-check. In the last month: Do you feel recovered after a weekend, or does Sunday-evening dread start by Saturday night? Is your reduced capacity tied to one specific deadline, or is it just how things are now? If your single worst recurring task vanished tomorrow, would you feel fine, or would something else immediately take its place? If your answers point to "it is just how things are now," you are dealing with systemic burnout, and the fixes are structural, not personal. Reclaim deep work with routing, not willpower Deep work does not survive on discipline. It survives on routing. The senior engineer's calendar is a public

Um relato honesto de alguém que trabalha com design, vive com TDAH e está cansada de dicas genéricas Tem um tipo de artigo sobre organização que eu já sei de cor. É sempre alguma variação de: “faça uma lista, use Pomodoro, durma 8 horas e beba água”. Só que tem um cenário que quase nunca aparece nessas listas: O momento em que você não é neurotípica, está em burnout, tem duas tarefas importantes com o mesmo prazo e nenhuma técnica milagrosa resolve. É sobre isso que eu quero falar aqui. Sumário: O cenário caótico (e bem real) Por que o Pomodoro não funciona pra todo mundo Burnout em quem tem TDAH O dia em que duas tarefas importantes têm o mesmo prazo Estratégia 1: uma prioridade verdadeira por dia Estratégia 2: subtarefas em vez de cronômetro Estratégia 3: time blocking gentil (agenda que não te esmaga) Estratégia 4: reduzir fricção em vez de exigir mais disciplina Estratégia 5: contratos curtos consigo mesma E quando nada disso parece suficiente? Referências O cenário caótico (e bem real) Imagina o seguinte: Projeto A : entrega do pitch da pós, com prazo na sexta. Projeto B: preparar apresentação do roadmap, também para sexta. Você já está cansada, a cabeça rodando, o corpo em modo economia de energia. Aí você joga no Google “como se organizar” e recebe de volta: “Use a técnica Pomodoro, 25 minutos de foco, 5 de pausa.” E você pensa: “Amiga, eu mal estou levantando da cama. Você quer que eu vire um cronômetro humano?” A real é que muita técnica de produtividade tradicional foi pensada para cérebros neurotípicos. Quando a gente vive com TDAH, burnout ou os dois juntos, essa lógica simplesmente não encaixa tão bem. Por que o Pomodoro não funciona pra todo mundo Pomodoro é ótimo… para algumas pessoas. Mas tem motivos bem específicos para ser um caos para muitos de nós. Por exemplo: A pausa obrigatória, interrompe justo quando o foco finalmente chegou. A sensação do timer contando, aumenta a ansiedade em vez de ajudar. Cada “reinício de ciclo” vira mais uma micro deci

Every developer I know has built something for themselves. A productivity tool. A habit tracker. A personal finance app. An AI that makes them smarter, faster, calmer. I did the same thing for 2 years. Then I had a conversation with someone close to me that I completely mishandled — and I realised no amount of personal productivity tools would have helped me there. The problem wasn't me, individually. The problem was the space between us. So I started asking a weird question Why has all of AI been built for individuals? Copilot helps you code faster. ChatGPT makes you smarter. Notion AI organises your thoughts. Calm helps you sleep better. Not one of them is built for what happens when two people try to understand each other. That's a massive gap. And it's one I couldn't stop thinking about. What I built Mendle — an AI-powered Relationship Intelligence platform. Not a therapy app. Not a chatbot companion. Not another journaling tool with an AI skin on top. The core idea is **shared emotional memory. Most relationship apps are built around one person's perspective. You log your feelings. You get insights. Your partner is an afterthought in the architecture. Mendle is different at the data model level. Both people contribute. Both people benefit. The AI builds an understanding of the relationship not just an individual. Over time it surfaces patterns. Communication loops. Emotional triggers. The things you keep missing because you're too close to them. The technical challenge that surprised me Building AI for two people is fundamentally harder than building it for one. Single-user AI: one context window, one set of preferences, one voice to understand. Relationship AI: two different communication styles, two different emotional vocabularies, shared history that neither person has complete visibility into, and privacy boundaries that have to be respected even between partners. The shared memory architecture was the hardest part to get right. How do you build something

Field journal of Dr. E. Rempel, Department of Minority Neurological Studies, University of New Carthage (A work of fiction. "Allism" is a real term used by some autistic people to describe the neurological profile of the non-autistic majority.) March 3, 2089 I have now spent three months embedded with an allistic community in the outer provinces. Allism, for those unfamiliar, is a rare neurological variant affecting approximately 1% of our population. My colleagues at the University have long debated its origins and persistence. After direct observation, I am no more certain of the answers, but I have accumulated a remarkable set of field notes. The allistic subjects I have observed appear, on the surface, entirely functional. They hold jobs, maintain relationships, raise children. And yet their neurological profile diverges from the norm in ways that are at once fascinating and bewildering. March 11, 2089 The most immediately striking feature of the allistic profile is their relationship with information. Where a typical individual experiences the sharing of useful knowledge as a basic social reflex, the allistic subject appears to require an elaborate ritual before any information exchange can occur. Approach an allistic subject directly with a piece of useful data and observe what happens. Rather than receiving it, they freeze. A threat-assessment process appears to engage, entirely pre-consciously, before the content of the communication can be evaluated at all. One subject described it to me as feeling "strange" when a stranger approached with unsolicited information, though she could not articulate why. I have learned to preface all information exchanges with what my translator calls "the preamble ritual" — a sequence of social signals that appears to deactivate the threat response and allow communication to proceed. The exact form varies, but typically involves eye contact, a softening of posture, and verbal acknowledgment that one is about to speak. Only the

As I'm observing engineers, I notice that most of them share the same characteristic: unending loads of curiosity. You, software developers, are deeply interested in how things work underneath; you implement, break, troubleshoot, fix, and break again. You create apps that people use everyday and by doing so, you shape the digitalised world we live in today. Now let me share something personal: I am terrified of breaking things. I am often terrified to such an extent that I find it hard to breathe. I am suffering from something called Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which basically means I am allergic to uncertainty. While most people see trying something new as exciting, for me it's a source of stress. Every unknown step, every unfamiliar process, every situation where I don't know what comes next — it triggers something. My brain immediately goes to the worst-case scenarios. "I can't do this." "I'll do it wrong." "What if something breaks?" These thoughts don't just pop up and disappear — they pile on top of each other until they become paralyzing. But this story isn't about anxiety — it's about how good UX can change a moment from overwhelming to manageable. And how you, as a software developer, can make a real change for people who are struggling. The app that saved my day A few months ago I decided to change my mobile operator. The alternative offer had much better terms that sounded really appealing to me. No long-term contract, competitive prices, support for eSIM for travellers abroad – in short: very flexible. Head held high, I went to the new operator's office to ask them to transfer my number. But the agent quickly wiped the smile off my face. "Yes, this offer is flexible, but you need to do all the operational work yourself in the app. I can only offer you a regular long-term contract," he said. He gave me my new SIM card, and I, with a long face, went to the nearby cafe. The thought that I had to transfer my number myself felt daunting. "What if I do

This specific undertaking is not fundamentally burdensome in terms of labor; however, this endeavor serves as the crucial support for my unwavering commitment to see it through to its ultimate conclusion. It is precisely the motivation behind my relentless 72-hour shifts and the impetus that prevents me from ceasing my efforts. My affection amidst my grief—my aspiration is to assist others and ensure that the tragedy you experienced is never repeated. Caitlyn Walmsley, RIP. I will love you always.

I work on a computer all day. Multiple projects, lots of switching, constant interruptions. A while back I noticed I was losing track of my own work. Not really the big things but mostly the small stuff. The decision I made on Tuesday about why I structured something a certain way. The thing I was halfway through when a Slack message pulled me away. The task that never made it onto any list because it felt too small to write down (but I ended up forgetting about after lunch until 2 days later). By Friday I'd look back at the week and genuinely struggle to piece together everything I actually did. I tried obsidian (and still actively use it). I also tried just being more disciplined. None of it fully stuck because the friction of capturing things manually meant I only ever captured the stuff I already remembered. The messy ad-hoc stuff that actually eats a lot of my time never made it anywhere. I'm curious if other people deal with this. Not the big project management stuff because that's mostly solved, but rather, the stuff in between. The context that lives in your head and disappears the moment you get interrupted. How do you handle it?

Here are two scenes. They look unrelated. They're not. Scene 1 Two people at a café, talking about a restaurant they want to try. A stranger walking past stops: "That place closed six months ago. The one on the corner is better." A brief nod, and they walk on. The two people exchange a glance, taken aback. Why did that person stop? What did they want? A few steps away, the stranger is also confused. They had useful information. They shared it. Why did these people react so strangely? Scene 2 A colleague is visibly stressed, describing a difficult situation at work. One friend pulls their chair closer, puts a hand on their arm: "That sounds really hard." Another opens their laptop: "I found something that might help — HR has a process for exactly this, I'll send you the link." The colleague leans into the first. Glances uncertainly at the second. The second person doesn't understand why sitting close and saying "that sounds hard" counts as helping. You haven't solved anything. The first doesn't understand why anyone would respond to distress with links. Both scenes end the same way: people on both sides convinced they did the right thing, confused by the other's reaction. The mismatch is mutual and invisible from the inside. Two survival instincts, two empathy systems For many autistic people, information is a survival mechanism. Uncertainty is threat, missing information is a vulnerability, and the drive to correct and share runs below conscious awareness. Empathy, expressed through that system , looks like giving someone what keeps you safe: accurate information, solutions, resources. The social preamble before sharing — announcing yourself, softening the approach — doesn't arise as a concept. Why would useful information require an introduction? For many neurotypical people, social safety is a survival mechanism. Group cohesion and reading others accurately are what keep people safe. Empathy, expressed through that system , looks like presence: mirroring distress,

For a long time, I thought productivity was about effort. Work harder. Focus more. Stay disciplined. Manage time better. Most productivity advice is built around some version of this idea. Then I noticed something strange. Some days I could spend ten hours at a desk and accomplish almost nothing. Other days I could spend three hours working and make more progress than I had all week. The difference wasn't effort. The difference was context. The Most Expensive Thing Is Not Time Ask people what their most limited resource is and most will answer: Time. But for knowledge workers, engineers, researchers, writers, and designers, I think the scarcer resource is often something else. Mental state. The ability to hold a problem in your head. The ability to remember why a decision was made. The ability to see connections between ideas. The ability to continue a train of thought without interruption. That's the state where meaningful work happens. And it's surprisingly fragile. Every Context Switch Has a Cost Imagine you're debugging a difficult issue. You've already: read the logs inspected the code traced the requests formed a hypothesis You're finally starting to see the shape of the problem. Then: a Slack notification arrives someone schedules a meeting an email requires attention a different task becomes urgent The interruption itself might only take two minutes. The real cost is what disappears. The mental model. The momentum. The partially constructed map inside your head. The next time you return to the task, you don't continue where you left off. You rebuild. Software Often Creates The Problem It Tries To Solve One thing that surprised me after building products for years is how much software exists primarily because other software creates friction. A note-taking application exists because memory is limited. A task manager exists because priorities change. A research assistant exists because information is fragmented. Many tools are not solving fundamental problems.