This week, we’re starting a new journey on code faster: Fast Typing. If you’re a programmer, I don’t need to explain to you that you’re typing 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week for your entire career. I don’t need to explain to you how often you’ll perform a grueling refactor where you mindlessly perform the same keystrokes again. And again. And again. I don’t need to remind you of how much time you spend scrolling through code, fixing “style nits”. You already know this. If you’re aspiring to code faster, this is fundamental in your pursuit. Now that you’re thinking about typing faster, you might be thinking about some of these questions:
Am I typing efficiently? Is my keyboard layout efficient? Is my keyboard efficient? Am I using an efficient general purpose text editor? Am I using it efficiently? Am I using efficient text editing conventions across tools? Am I automating typing (the fastest human typist types 18 characters/second, whereas a run of the mill computer can easily type 18 million characters/second)? Are you automating refactoring? Are you automating linting? If no tool exists to automate your typing, are you making your own tools?
Unfortunately, answering each of these questions requires investigating a deep and wide topic takes hours of research and experimentation. Valuable time you could spend shipping code. To save you time, I’ll do the heavy lifting for you and synthesize my professional experience and research into a once a week, 5-15 minute read with immediately applicable advice that will help you type faster. Each week’s post goes out, like always, every Tuesday at 12PM EST on this blog and if you’re subscribed, direct to your inbox.
If there’s any fast typing topics that you’d like to know more about, or if you want to share your expertise on the matter, just leave a comment below or dm me on twitter, @canardivore. If you don’t want to miss out on how to type faster, subscribe now by clicking the Subscribe now button below.