I wrote this article without ever looking at the keyboard

At the beginning of the year, I felt that I had hit the ceiling as an engineer. It seems to be reading thick books, solving complex tasks at work, speaking at conferences. But it's not that. Therefore, I decided to return to the roots and take turns to close the skills that I once considered in my childhood as basic for a programmer.



The first on the list was a blind seal, which had been put off for a long time. Now I consider it necessary for everyone for whom code and configuration is a profession. Under the cut, I’ll tell you how my world turned upside down and share tips on how to turn your world around. At the same time, I invite you to share my recipes and opinions.









What distinguishes a programmer who uses a mouse from a programmer who uses hotkeys? The gulf. Almost unattainable speed and quality of work, all other things being equal.



What distinguishes a programmer who uses hotkeys from a programmer who can print blindly? Another big abyss.

What for me this

Can you print blindly? No, I'm not talking about the case when you write 10 words, and then you look at the keyboard. But in a normal way.

• When you hone precision and number of characters per minute.
• When you correct words without looking at the keys.
• When using both ciphers.
• When each symbol has its own finger.

Until December or January of this year, I could not print blindly. And I was not particularly worried about this. Then a colleague shamed me, and I decided to learn by all means. Having tried different simulators, I settled on typingclub.com . A couple of months, one twitching eye, and 20 words per minute are mine.

What for you this

We live in a world of blind printers.



The whole world around is created by programmers-blind printer for people like them:

• You open vim, and there almost all hotkeys are single-character. While you are looking at them on the keyboard, you will be as fast as an accountant grandmother, who types in two fingers with an unfamiliar layout: “Sooooo, iiii with a dot, uh, like a dollar, ji like si with a squiggle; ".
• In general, all this marvelous zoo of Linux utilities like less or innotop. Everything is tied to the fact that you will use one-letter hotkeys.

And next to it is full of the same ten fingers:

• Here a friend, riding a snowboard, says: "Now I’ll come home, I’ll add 15 pages of the dissertation." You ask, they say, save up? And he: "Yes, no, I know what to write about, I'll sit down and write quickly." And then it turns out that he takes this skill for granted and never spoke about it, because he believed that everyone knows how.
• Or another comrade: "Have you noticed that when you sit down with those who do not type blindly, it seems that they are soooooo very slow?"
• Almost all of the most productive of my colleagues, it turns out, own this thing.

A blind seal will save from copy-paste:

• I used to think it’s easier to copy 10 lines than write them. Or even one, just to not make a mistake. Now I just write what I want to write, and without stopping, I follow the correctness of what appears on the screen; without fear of typos, layout problems, or syntax / semantics errors.
• It turned out that I was still a graphomaniac: I began to keep a diary, pee articles. I wrote this one.
• Hotkeys began to learn fun. They ceased to be chords, but became a continuation of the already familiar keys.

You can think less about the number of actions, and more about quality:

• The code is often shorter, simply because you do a couple more refactoring cycles at the same time. Or you manage to write an optional but pleasant test.

In some games, you get an ability that allows you to fly over enemies that you had to fight with before. In the life of a programmer, such a super-ability is touch typing.



Now my result is about 60 words per minute on a familiar text and about 40 on an unfamiliar text.





I know that it is quite possible to finish up to 80, if you work on accuracy. That is, the faster you are, the less typos you have. Norm I’ll go some more.

Tips and tricks for those who decide to learn

To learn touch typing, follow two simple tips: experiment and relax.

Experiment

It so happened that in addition to the blind press over the past year, I mastered many things that needed to be displayed in muscle memory: a unicycle (unicycle), surfing, and began to touch the piano (slightly). Once upon a time he performed with juggling. And for all this, I have a common approach. I will try to describe it.



Your task is to complete the element in the maximum number of variations.

• In juggling, start with the other hand or shift your attention from catching the ball to the correct throw.
• On the piano - start playing the phrase in the middle or train without sound.
• On a unicycle, follow the correct posture, not the balance. Even at the cost of falling.

The touch typing simulator sets a goal: 100% accuracy and a certain speed. But he does not say how to achieve it. So you did the exercise. You have three out of five stars. The first desire is to repeat. Suddenly there will be more? Will be. Or will not be. I repeated it for 15 minutes with varying success. The way out is to make the head work during repetition.



When repeating, the head should work. How to achieve this?

• Alternate the error handling algorithm.
• Set intermediate goals related to accuracy, not speed.
• Sometimes deliberately writing slower than you want.
• Focus on the rhythm of the print, not on accuracy.
• Change places where you train.
• Change simulators.

You made a mistake during your workout. What to do?



In turn, use three action algorithms.







What for? Each time you have to think a little differently, so attention is not dulled.



Bad algorithm: "In case of an error, start over." So you will train the same thing all the time, moving very slowly forward.



For a change, I set goals related to accuracy.



Try not to make a mistake in writing:

• A specific letter throughout the text.
• A specific set of words in which you usually make mistakes.
• All first letters in all words.
• All the last letters in all words.
• All punctuation marks.
• Come up with your option.

And the most important thing.

Do not forget to relax

With monotonous repetition, the body goes into a zombie mode. You don’t notice it yourself. You can set an alarm for 10-15 minutes. And take a break, even if you think that everything is fine with you.



Somehow in the introduction to the book on Objective-C (which I do not program on) I read a phrase that should be remembered in the process of any training. I want to finish it.



“It's not you dumb, this is Objective-C complex. If possible, sleep 10 hours a day. ”

If you liked reading this longrid, then using my official position I invite you to my telegram channel . There I talk about SRE, share links and thoughts.