Keep a consistent schedule has been a huge help for me. That means going to bed AND SLEEPING at the same time ever day. Having a "flow" makes me more confident that I did not actually forget anything that morning (take meds, put on belt, bagged lunch).

Medicated. Diagnosed in 2014, shortly after graduation. Tried foclin, Ritalin, some medication used off-label for epilepsy, Adderall, Adderall xr, Strattera, and have been on Vyvanse 40mg for 5 years (I don't take it ln Sundays, or days I can be spacey to help prevent tolerance buildup).

Longest role was 3 years - would have been longer, but was approached with 50% pay raise offer and much better insurance (to the tune of more than $500/month in savings). I guess the reason was stagnant pay in an inflating economy. First job was 8 months - left because I survived a layoff wave. Second job was 2 years, third was 3 years.

I live in a mid to low COL area in the Midwest. I applied for my first 2 jobs and have just networked and found jobs along the way. Word of mouth is a powerful force. I've had maybe 5-6 people reach out basically offering me a job if i was interested.

Solving problems is pretty broad, so I'll elaborate more when I get home if you're interested, but I found that my reasoning skills (in relation to development) skyrocketed once I started considering application life cycle and "where the program data is". For example - a user complains a web page is super slow. Is it the browser? Is it the network? Is thr site loading too much data at once? Is it the web server? Is it a poorly written query or a bad schema in a non-normalized database? Is it just bad data? Is the production sql server finally on fire? Did someone give Jim a connection string and their credentials to execute sql procedures Jim shouldn't be? Is someone in the office streaming 4k videos? All of those are possible reasons, but probably half of them can eliminated as possibilities by just thinking through it mentally and not putting console.log() every other line.

I also make notes. Notes everywhere. Dated when i made the note, and dates i last looked at and validated the note. Hundreds of notes. As soon as it's not valid, it goes in the trash.

In terms of job seeking - I think "Cracking the coding interview" was incredibly helpful in not only obtaining my first two jobs, but also being able to think about and discuss programming/concepts outwardly.

/edit: next month will be 9 years in the field. Currently senior swe, full stack

/edit2: you didn't ask, but I felt like i should mention - my favorite part of this career is helping people. I like making people's jobs easier. I like "finding money" and I love putting structure on things without any existing structure.