42 Days, 42 Posts, and Hopefully Don’t Panic.
I own over 100 domain names. Five were reserved for this blog. This is the first post, which means I have been paying renewal fees for a website that did not exist.
If you have ever obtained an IPv4 allocation (/24 subnet1) before owning a single device to plug into it, you already understand me. If that sounds insane, welcome to the show.
This is the first post on a blog I have been provisioning for 20 years. Not writing. Provisioning. Writing is what you do when you have something to say. Provisioning is what you do when you need the infrastructure to exist before you can emotionally handle saying it.[1]2
I have a corporation. An ASN. ARIN-allocated IP space. Dedicated servers humming in two data centres. A multi-domain strategy that would make a regional ISP blush.
What I did not have, until exactly now, was a single published word.
That changes today.
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is famously 42. A supercomputer named Deep Thought is built by a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings. After 7.5 million years of computation, Deep Thought announces that the answer is 42. The beings are unsatisfied because they don’t know what the question actually is. Deep Thought then designs an even more powerful computer, Earth, to figure out the Ultimate Question itself. Unfortunately, Earth is destroyed by the Vogons just five minutes before it was to complete its 10-million-year calculation. The question is never revealed.
Over the next 42 days, because I am 42 years old and apparently decided to life-hack my midlife crisis using Douglas Adams math, I will publish one post per day. Two hours of writing. No more infrastructure procrastination. The routers are routed. The border gateway is open.
Let’s see if the packets actually flow.
The Brain as a Distributed System
Here is something they don’t tell you about ADHD: it is not a deficit of attention. It is a surplus of attention with no native routing protocol. My brain doesn’t lack focus. It lacks a default route. Every thought arrives with equal priority, and for thirty-odd years I assumed that was a bug.
It’s not. It’s BGP for cognition.3
In network engineering, Border Gateway Protocol doesn’t care about hierarchy. It cares about policy. Every autonomous system makes its own decisions about which paths to advertise, which to prefer, and which to quietly drop in a blackhole.4 The magic isn’t having fewer routes. It’s writing better route maps.
My ADHD brain works the same way. The problem was never the volume of thoughts. The problem was that I hadn’t configured the filtering.
When I debug a complex system now, a flapping BGP session5, a recursive DNS failure6, a TLS handshake7 having an existential crisis, I don’t fight the chaos. I route it. The part of my brain that wants to chase five tangents simultaneously isn’t a distraction from the work.
It is the work, once you learn to map the topology.
Hyperfocus Is Not a Superpower (But It’s Close)
People romanticize ADHD hyperfocus. They call it a superpower. I call it a distributed denial-of-service attack on everything that isn’t my current obsession.
When I’m in it, really in it, I can architect an entire business, write a character bible for a novel I’ll never finish, or rebuild a network topology in six hours. Without eating. Without moving. Without noticing that my husband has asked me the same question three times and is now considering divorce or an RFC8 to request comment on my mortality.
The output is extraordinary. The collateral damage is real.
The trick isn’t inducing hyperfocus. It’s aiming it. I treat it like a 100Gbps link with no QoS9: if I don’t shape the traffic before it hits the interface, it will saturate the wrong circuit and take down the voice VLANs10. So I front-load the decision. Stage the environment. Close the irrelevant tabs. Put the phone in another room. Then let the flood come.
“Productivity advice was written by people whose brains have a working scheduler.”
This is the opposite of what productivity culture teaches. Productivity culture says: break it into pieces, use a Pomodoro timer11, do one thing at a time. That advice was written by people whose brains have a working scheduler. Mine doesn’t. Mine has raw throughput and a cron daemon12 that wakes up screaming at 3 AM.
So I work with the burst, not against it.
Debugging as Pattern Recognition at Speed
The thing I’m genuinely, objectively best at is finding the broken thing in a system that shouldn’t be broken.
I used to think this was experience. Sure, that’s part of it. I’ve stared at enough packet captures13 that certain failure modes feel like recognizing a face in a crowd. But the real mechanism is harder to explain to neurotypical colleagues.
When a system fails in a novel way, most engineers start from the top: check the obvious, eliminate variables, narrow the scope. Methodical. Linear. Correct.
My brain doesn’t do that. My brain runs a parallelized scan across the entire problem space — including the “impossible” branches that methodical engineers already pruned. Ninety-five percent of what comes back is noise. Gibberish. Dream logic.
But that five percent, the thing that shouldn’t be relevant but is, that’s where the bug lives.
It looks like intuition from the outside. It’s not. It’s brute-force pattern matching on hardware that can’t stop generating candidate matches. The art isn’t in generating the ideas. It’s in filtering the output without discarding the signal.
The Dopamine Economy
Let’s talk about the thing nobody in tech wants to admit: a lot of us are running on dopamine, not discipline.
I have AuDHD — autism and ADHD, the full stack.14 My brain’s reward system doesn’t respond predictably to long-term incentives. “Finish this project and you’ll feel accomplished” is a routing advertisement my neurological BGP simply drops. Invalid prefix. Fails the filter.15
So I built my own incentive architecture. Small, immediate rewards for intermediate states. Public accountability. Novelty injection when the task becomes routine. I structure work like a game not because I’m immature, but because my brain literally requires gamification to maintain forward momentum.
This is not a weakness. It’s a different operating system. And once I stopped trying to run Windows on what is essentially a Linux kernel, things compiled.
The Blog Itself Is a Case Study
I’m writing this as proof-of-concept. If I can ship this — one piece of writing, published, routed to a domain that resolves — then the infrastructure wasn’t procrastination. It was staging. (Okay, it was 60 percent staging and 40 percent avoidance. But the packets are flowing now.)
The multi-domain strategy, the ASN, the WHM/cPanel server — all of it was me externalizing a planning loop that was otherwise stuck in my head.16 I couldn’t write until the routing was correct. That sounds absurd. But here we are: the routing is correct, and the words are coming.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved the consistency problem. This blog might have one post or fifty by the time 2027 arrives. But here’s the deal: I’m 42. I’m doing 42 posts in 42 days. Two hours a day. The same brain that spent three years perfecting infrastructure just produced these words in one hyperfocus session.
That ratio, three years to 1,400 words, is not a failure. It’s the topology of how I work.
And if you’re reading this, if these packets reached you, resolved against a domain I’ve been renewing since December 2021, then the routing was correct all along. The infrastructure wasn’t the procrastination. It was the first draft of the argument, written in servers instead of sentences.
I don’t know if 42 posts in 42 days will prove anything. Maybe it proves that an ADHD brain can build a routing protocol for itself, given enough time and the right infrastructure. Or maybe it just proves that I’ve been paying renewal fees on a domain for five years and it’s time I got my money’s worth. Either way, the packets are flowing. Tomorrow, I send another one.
The silos are going to talk to each other. That’s the whole point.
By Adam David
Footnotes and Further Reading
- /24 Subnet: A network block containing 256 IP addresses (254 usable). Leasing one before you have a single device is the networking equivalent of buying a 50-room mansion for yourself and a houseplant. ↩︎
- Provisioning vs. Writing: In infrastructure engineering, provisioning means setting up servers, networks, and services before deployment. I have provisioned approximately 0 words until today. ↩︎
- BGP (Border Gateway Protocol): The routing protocol that makes the internet work by exchanging reachability information between autonomous systems. See RFC 4271. ↩︎
- Autonomous System (AS): A collection of IP networks and routers under a single technical administration, identified by an ASN. BGP path selection is policy-driven, not purely hierarchical. ↩︎
- Flapping: In networking, a route that constantly alternates between available and unavailable states. Like a light switch someone is flicking repeatedly. It drives network engineers insane in a way that is technically measurable. ↩︎
- Recursive DNS: A DNS resolver that queries multiple servers on your behalf until it finds the answer. A recursive DNS failure means the resolver gave up and nobody knows why. It is the technical equivalent of a shrug. ↩︎
- TLS Handshake: The cryptographic negotiation that happens when your browser connects to a secure website. If it fails, it usually means certificates are expired, misconfigured, or the server is having a worse day than you are. ↩︎
- RFC (Request for Comments): The formal document process used by the Internet Engineering Task Force to define technical standards. Using one to request comment on your mortality is not standard practice, but it would be more entertaining than most RFCs. ↩︎
- QoS (Quality of Service): Network traffic management strategy to prevent congestion and ensure performance for critical data. Think of it as traffic shaping for your router — and, apparently, my attention span. ↩︎
- VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network): A way to partition a physical network into separate logical networks. Voice VLANs carry phone traffic. If they go down, so do the phones. I have done this. I am not proud of it. ↩︎
- Pomodoro Technique: A productivity method where you work in 25-minute intervals with short breaks. It works great for people whose brains respect timers. Mine treats them as a suggestion, at best. ↩︎
- Cron: A Unix/Linux scheduler that runs tasks at specified times. A cron daemon waking up screaming at 3 AM is not a real thing, but it should be, because that is exactly what my brain does. ↩︎
- Packet Capture: A recording of all network traffic passing through a point. Reading them is like reading a transcript of every conversation in a crowded room. It is as exhausting as it sounds. ↩︎
- AuDHD: Clinical and community term for co-occurring Autism and ADHD. Research suggests 50-70 percent of autistic people also have ADHD. See Medical News Today and the UK expert consensus in BMC Medicine. ↩︎
- Invalid Prefix / BGP Drops: In BGP, a router can be configured with route filters that reject (drop) advertised IP prefixes based on policy. If my brain were a router, “future satisfaction” gets filtered at the edge. ↩︎
- ASN and ARIN: An Autonomous System Number identifies a network on the internet. ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) allocates IP space and ASNs in North America. See ARIN’s IPv4 request guide. ↩︎