more typing

Today marks the day I got to 60 Words-Per-Minute typing speed at https://monkeytype.com. It's been around 12 days since I started learning the proper  way to type (called touch typing) and 11 days since my previous post on the topic. In that post I mentioned that I was around 60 WPM with my regular typing skills, so it looks like it took me a dozen days just to get back to were I was back then.

Frankly, it's been annoying af. Especially the first week. So much brain power is dedicated to just placing your fingers on the keyboard correctly that it made writing code really difficult. Since my brain was working hard already, my coding skills were heavily degraded. I literally felt like I was a junior developer again, struggling to solve the simplest of problems.

Another challenge was the editor. The coding editor I use (vim, btw) relies heavily on keyboard navigation and shortcuts. And changing your finger positions messes you muscle memory for those shortcuts completely. So, I had to learn everything again. This made the job a lot trickier, since it essentially doubled the amount of work and seriously impaired my productivity.

And here, at day 12, I still struggle a little. I have enough muscle memory to write fairly fast but the consistency is still not very good. Basically, I type some words very fast now, but others take a looong time because they use rarely-practiced characters, like "z" or "q". Also, using my pinky for typing still feels very awkward. I really hope this feeling will go away once I get more practice with different symbols and other keys around the keyboard.

However, there are some benefits already. There is far more potential for improvement now, as my hands have more flexibility and I'm using all of my fingers instead of just a few. The words that I practiced a lot are very easy to type, and I am getting very high WPM on some of them (like 75, or even 80+). Average is till 60 but that is because there is still a lot of practice that I need to do. I am certain that this figure will be over 70 in like a week or two.

It's been a great exercise in patience and persistence so far. However, I really enjoyed it and watching my own progress has been very rewarding.

And now, back to practice!

This post is part of the #100days project, where I try to write a post a day. Today is #day28