Tales of the Autistic Developer - Bringing It Into Focus | baweaver

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Simplicity is hard work. But there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work.<br>— Rich Hickey

autism<br>August 10, 2026<br>12 min read

Tales of the Autistic Developer - Bringing It Into Focus

For those who don’t know me, I’m autistic. I’ve been a developer for north of two decades now.

I didn’t find out I was ASD until 19, and didn’t reconcile with that until years later. These posts will be a combination of advice I’ve given to those who are like me, as well as a letter of sorts to my past self who could have used a lot of it.

I write these posts in the hopes that someone like me will find value in knowing a very simple and very important truth about ASD:

You are not alone, and you are loved.

Bringing It Into Focus

If you’ve seen me at work you might have seen this play out, and I fully agree it probably looks ridiculous.

I have music blasting, headphones on, I’m pacing around the room or wandering through my home, hands conducting some symphony only I can hear, and if you’re trying to talk to me I will not register a single word of it. I’m somewhere else entirely, and what I’m doing there is trying to find a solution to something I’m particularly stuck on today.

This post is about how I process those problems, because it took me forever to understand that the way I think and process isn’t remotely like how other people do it, and longer still to stop apologizing for it. End of the day I am who I am, and I’ve come to accept that.

The Image Is There

Something I learned recently was that there was a name for how I visually process information. I don’t remember where but I saw this test about visualizing an apple and how some people have no ability to form that image in their minds. I’ve since seen it all over the place, sure, but it always confused me because I’m able to fully model an apple in front of my face right now. Really, several apples, different types, maybe a few bites out of them or some dirt or dings. I can rotate it, send it flying, almost physically feel it in my hands, I can smell it and I can tell you what it tastes like too.

You see I have hyperphantasia, which when connected with autism gets interesting. My senses are already turned up to 11 at any given time, and hyperphantasia means I can freely manipulate them to project visions into reality. If you’ve never heard the term it means that my mental imagery is so vivid it can be indistinguishable from the thing being present right in front of me. If I wanted to I could even project myself back to my childhood home with the exact carpet, paint, smells, furniture, all of it like it was back in the 1990s. It’s not quite photographic memory as much as snapshots of particularly strong experiences through my life I can summon on demand.

I never knew there was a name for this until very recently, and I definitely didn’t know it wasn’t something everyone could do. For years I assumed when people asked me to picture something they meant in full high-definition right in front of my face. Turns out that wasn’t the case.

Why does this matter? Well when I’m working on a hard problem doing everything above? I am quite literally looking at it in front of my face.

I remember back when I was in school I had seen the first Iron Man movie with all the screens whizzing around and rearranged with a gesture. Everyone else saw a cool sci-fi UI/UX. Me? That’s how I process information. I construct representations of systems in my head from components to relationships, through to the data flow, constraints, all of it flying around in my head where I look at it from different angles until something hits me.

So why the music and theatrics? They’re not distractions, in a way they’re grounding mechanisms while I keep rotating things in my head.

Rotation

I do not process things linearly. It’s not a step-by-step process I could talk someone through as much as it’s like looking for the perfect angle, focus, lighting, and composition for a picture.

I know the image is there, hiding. I can see the general shape, some more blurry than others, but I know it’s there and I don’t quite have the right settings to capture that photo yet. The pieces haven’t clicked so I keep making adjustments, rotating things, changing my angle of approach, zooming or panning around to see how it relates to the bigger whole.

Some solutions come to me immediately, I can see it at a glance, and the more experienced I become the more frequently that tends to happen. Other times? Well that can take days or weeks, sometimes months, and I’ll be background processing that problem while the rest of my life continues on top of it.

When that solution comes it’s like a bucket of ice water to the face. You might see me go wide-eyed and start grinning like an idiot, because I now know with...