How fast touch typing helps programmers - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

from 2021-05-01T14:57:13

:: ::

https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=1&textfile=mediumText.txt&mode=sent&result_url=/result.html&bt=0
Hello friends. So this morning in my discord we had a little bit of aconversation about touch typing. One of my friends there asked if they
should get into Vim and they were thinking that Vim you can move a littlefaster and well I think that's that can be true.
I think there's a little bit of an illusion to moving quickly just because
you're using a special text editor or editor or a VIM like key bindings
thing. I think you can get just as fast without them. And I've been on both
sides, but yeah, andNow I'm not using them keen bitings But anyway I think,
we kind of came around to touch typing was the thing that was selling themdown.
They could improve their speed if they just were able to type a littlefaster. And so I thought yeah, I just got me thinking this morning about
how valuable it can be to be able to type very quickly. I think most of ushave been in a situation where the interface to the computer wasn't fast
enough for our brain where we knew exactly what we wanted and it was just amatter of getting what we wanted into our hands andInto the keyboard and
into the computer.And so in particular, sometimes I say hey if you aren't sure about which
direction to go with some API or something then focus on building bothversions and choose which one you dislike the least is kind of my approach
to things and so what it's it's not without cost to do that like it does
cost to build it both ways, but if you like have it in your mind of whatthose ways are going to look like and and it's not like a huge.
Investment of mental energy to do it then the investment just comes down tohow quickly can you type and you can reduce that investment by learning to
type quicker. And so if you are not at right now I took a typing test andin a kind of real world sort of test.
I'm at around 88 words per minute and so I'm a pretty fast typer or typist
however you want to say that. If you're not at around that pace then let me
just tell you that the human body is capable of really amazing things ourbrains are are capable of amazing things and you can probably work your way
up.To to much quicker than you are And I would encourage you to put someintentional practice into that if you want to improve your typing speed.
Now, there's a lot more to coding than just the typing speed. So don't
worry about that. I spend way more time thinking than I do typing but Iknow situations where typing is the bottleneck it's really frustrating if
you're not very fast at it.
So I'd encourage you to give it some intentional practice. Anyway, I hope
that's helpful and interesting I will add a link to a the typing test that
I took so you can take it yourself.Have a good day.

Further episodes of 3 Minutes with Kent

Further podcasts by Kent C. Dodds

Website of Kent C. Dodds