Fasttypping.com
I spend almost four hours at my office trying to figure out why a piece of software wasn’t working properly. After I complained for quite a while, my boss, finally, called The Guy. He came to my desk in five minutes, grabbed my computer and drove from one app to a console to the browser looking for logs into the system at, literally, the speed of sound. After aprox. 1.18 minutes, he told me: “yeah, your permissions are deprecated. You just have to update them”. Then, he just left, probably to come back to a biggest battle against Godzilla size bugs that need more than a minute to fix.
I was completely dumbfounded. What the hell I’ve just seen? What is this sorcery? How the hell I can do that by myself? Then, clearly, I saw that one of the foundations of being an awesome programmer was to be as fast as your mind can be when you are communicating with a computer. Then I started to pay attention to the technique of every developer at the office and soon I decided who was better programmer than others just by their ability to type fast (and without the need of ←). Bingo, numbers match and obviously the best writers are the best coders. It’s not a correlation, but it’s a fact. I assume that’s because the best ones know they need to be as good as typing as thinking so they took the time to polish their techniques.
So I started to take it seriously and with perseverance. You only need five minutes per day. Not a bad trade, right? You can do it at home, at the cafe, or at the beach house. I improved a lot, really. I’m not fast enough yet (neither accurate←), but I truly improved my skills. Here is one of the best apps I found to learn, with a visual keyboard so you can physically memorize the movements. The website also saves your progress if you log in (with your google account).
- PS: this cafe is so cool they are playing The Eraser (Pista/Montreal)
