Post #1: My unregulated ADHD brain, and why I'm failing on purpose

Hi, I'm Sai.

I'm a Lead Architect. These days I spend most of my time on cloud systems, Kubernetes and keeping things running when they'd rather fall over. I live in the UK, I'm originally from India, and I have far more ideas than I have finished projects.

This is my first post here, so before the tech stuff, I want to be honest about how my head actually works. Most of what I'll write here will make more sense once you know this.

I have ADHD. Never diagnosed, never treated. For most of my life I didn't even have a name for it. I just thought this is how my brain works.

Looking back, the signs were always there:

• Forgetting. Keys, messages, things people told me five minutes ago, gone.
• Hyperfocus. When something grabs me, I go all in. Hours disappear. Sometimes sleep disappears too.
• Jumping. New idea, new tool, new subject. The old one is still half open in another tab.
• Starting, not finishing. The first 70% is exciting. The last 30% feels like pushing a wall.
• Looping. When something bothers me, I replay it again and again and can't switch it off.
• Time blindness. "Just five minutes" becomes three hours, or a whole day goes and I don't know where.

My mornings are slow, and I like them that way. An americano, no rush, just me and whatever my head is chewing on. I actually love being alone with my thoughts. It's where most of my ideas come from, and, to be fair, most of my overthinking too. Then the gym. Those are the only two fixed points in my day. After that, there's no plan. Everything else just happens, or doesn't.

That's been my whole story. I started as a PHP developer. Then I got pulled into digital marketing. Then infrastructure, cloud, Kubernetes. Somewhere in between, I went days without proper sleep, learnt Rust from scratch and built tools on Solana. Nobody asked me to. I just couldn't stop. I started a rental agents idea that's still sitting unfinished. And even now, with a full-time job, I randomly jump into calculus at night because something clicked and I need to understand it.

The cycle is always the same. Big energy at the start. Then the excitement fades, I start seeing risks, something new looks more interesting, and I jump. I end up with a lot of knowledge and very few finished things.

It doesn't stay in work either. Recently I got stuck on a person. The same intensity I bring to anything new, I brought to her. When she pulled away, I couldn't let go. I kept chasing even after it was clear she didn't want the same thing. I told myself it was love, and part of it was. But a lot of it was me wanting control over something that was never mine to control. When I can't control the outcome, my brain loops. It replays, it plans, it tries again. ADHD might explain some of that, but it doesn't excuse it. I'm not proud of how long I kept going.

Right now, honestly, things are a bit messed up. I'm not writing this from the other side.

But I'm trying to regulate it now, instead of just letting it run me. Not fix it, not pretend it isn't there. Just work with it. The gym helps. The slow mornings help. Writing things down before they disappear helps. Noticing when I'm looping and stepping away, even when every part of me wants to send one more message or open one more tab. Some days it works. Some days it doesn't. I'm counting both.

So here's the plan. If I can't stop wanting control, I can point it somewhere useful. Control the inputs, not the outcome. Small projects with a clear finish line. Deliberate failures, like breaking a Kubernetes cluster on purpose, where failing is the whole point and I learn something every time. Controlled failure instead of chaotic failure.

This blog is part of that. It's not a portfolio piece and it's not advice. It's me thinking out loud, twice a week if I can keep it up. I'll write about what I'm building, what's breaking, and what I'm learning. I want to start from the maths, calculus and linear algebra, and work my way up to the hardware that runs AI: GPUs, Google's TPUs, the AI chips the big clouds build for themselves, and newer designs like Cerebras and Groq. Why they're built so differently, and what that means for the infrastructure I work on every day. Plus the ideas I keep chasing, and hopefully a few I finish.

If your brain works like mine, maybe some of this will feel familiar.

Let's see how many times I fail before I figure it out.

— Sai