Welcome to Issue #7! 🧡

I’m Luce, a newly diagnosed combined ADHDer from the UK. The aim of this newsletter is to share with you my journey as I try medication and other techniques to get a better handle on my chaotic brain. Plus things I have found interesting that week or caught my attention!

Been a quiet week in many ways.

Been focusing a lot on the talks I am giving next month for MongoDB, so lots of rehearsals, including with a speaker coach.

I played Twilight Imperium on Saturday, a complex turn-based strategy board game. It takes about 12 hours to play in total and we even achieved a new record of one round taking 3 hours! But it was great to see some old familiar faces again and do something incredibly nerdy.

Got a quiet weekend coming up so that will be nice. Am looking forward to getting some jobs done around the house and playing some video games. 🎮

My awesome boss Rita mentioned a song earlier that I had forgotten about for a long time but is a classic that I have ‘rocked out’ to many times so enjoy!

My favourite tool for managing my life both personally and professionally is Notion. This week they released an amazing new feature at last allowing you to do grouping on some common component types including lists and boards.

A Youtuber I often follow for Notion tips and templates, Thomas Frank, released a video this week all about it. It’s quite specific to people who use Notion but it has definitely been the most interesting video I have seen this week.

Another productive week in the book’s department!

I picked up Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, as mentioned in last week’s issue, but at only 132 pages, I was able to read it in the space of a day while travelling to and from the gym so that’s another book ticked off.

A lot of the content is talking about artists/writers and their creativity but a lot of the 10 tips in here can easily translate to other types of content.

It didn’t hit me with as much inspiration as I was expecting, based off how excited some other people I know have got about the book, but it was a useful read none the less.

I am still trying to decide on a new active non-fiction book to read, am torn. between a few so feel free to make some suggestions :)

As some of my followers may know, I have been working on and off for a while, on an app called EmotiPal, intended to help neurodivergent people understand sentiment and emotion better.

One of the features I wanted to add was the ability to see history. Not only can this be helpful as a training tool, but it might mean not having to check at all as the content is there in the history.

I recently tried to implement storing it in a MongoDB Realm Database as this has online/offline sync out the box, all free and I am surrounded by colleagues who can help. However I had an issue and reached out for help. I got some great feedback and decided I needed to try and fix the issue.

So last Friday I decided to stream on Twitch and share learning about Realm and fixing these issues out in the open.

I am pleased to report that we got it working, woo! We can save sentiment history to the database at the point of analysing it, and the page displays the history as well.

The next plan is to make the history look more interesting on the page instead of just some text. Once that is looking good I will move on to storing the emotional recognition. This involves photos which you would store elsewhere rather than a document database, so that means involving something like Blob storage so some interesting lessons to be learned as we implement that one!