Stop Typing Fast | Prime Reacts

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[farqueueman]

Typing is for suckers, I stare down the compiler until it produces the binary I want.

[Mooooov]

Also an underrated way of improving: learning a US layout.

I’m from Germany, we use a QWERTZ ISO Lay-out with our lovely special chars ÖÄÜ. Since they take space, commonly used symbols in programming like (){}[] are all on a shift layer on the num row. This sucks ass for programming as it’s extremely inconvenient and unergonomic. Switching my keyboard layout to an US one was easily one of the biggest quality of life improvements I had last year (and if you have a QMK keyboard you can stop customize beloved ÖÄÜ chars to be reasonably easy to reach).

[animanaut]

one thing i noticed when doing screenshares or pairprogramming is: if you think speed does not matter, you have not witnessed a slow typer that on top of it uses his mouse and not a single shortcut other than copy pasta. a great exercise in patience, let me tell you. try it. it might change your mind..

[tears_falling]

I used to type around 90wpm, but then I had a repetitive stress injury. Couldn't touch the keyboard, couldn't even hold a spoon in my hand for long enough to eat properly. The doctor said I won't be able to get back to programming ever again. I have partially recovered since then, and I've been typing daily for a couple of months. I'm much slower than I've used to be, and it annoyed me a lot at first, but I've learned to work differently. I'm feeling like I can get stuff done in a decent amount of time, even though I'm not a blazingly fast typist. I'd say not to stress about your typing speed, and always pay attention to ergonomics.

[tbqhwyf]

You can, in fact, think faster than 100 words per minute. According to what I found on google, the average talking speed is 150-200 words per minute! Stenotypes (used in court to write down everything people say) can effortlessly reach speeds of up to 300 words per minute because a keyboard user won't keep up with the speech or will get tired very fast

[arijanj]

Agreed on everything except the monkeytype take, I think monkeytype boosts your speed by a lot because the words are easy to type and as soon as you spend some time on it they start getting ingrained in your muscle memory, making your results even faster. This means that even if you don't fully know and understand the layout in your heart you can get a really good score by typing easy words.

[rewrose]

Typing fast is part of the whole "fail faster" thing

[PhilippeCarphin]

One thing touch typing helps for is it frees up brain power for thinking about code. It's not important to type super fast but it is so useful to type *effortlessly* at a decent speed.

[richie]

Sometime last year I was still looking at the keyboard when I typed. I decided to started practicing proper typing techniques for the very same reasons you mentioned in the video and I've improved from 30+ words per minute to 50+ words per minute. I don't practice as much as I should so I haven't been improving quickly but it makes such a huge difference in focus not having to constantly be distracted to look at the keyboard.

[ianmcgaunn]

'i'm an okay typer - i get around 150wpm' --- such a crazy flex. Also, none of the best programmers I know are 'one finger types' other than engineers over 70 who started on punch cards or some shit

[EdmondDantèsDE]

In order to type fast you also have to type correctly. If you restart your test until you have a good one the result is meaningless.
Also by default Monkeytype only uses the most common English words without upper case letters or symbols. It's not very representative of real text or code.

[tomekhome]

I'm not quite in the programming, but Network Engineering and design and what You said about typing fast is totally true. To me this is the most important skill that I've ever picked up. Writing documentation, responding to shit emails, responding on slack, it all just adds up. Same thing in console, it's just invaluable. Typing fast with the least amount of errors is king.

[srijanraghavula]

Prime's face at 2:22 as theo talks about his macbook looks like someone trying to hold their laugh at a funeral

[J_CtheEngineer]

Interesting. I’m a mechanical engineer with a focus on design, but I also explore ideas with my hands, my sketch my thoughts in 3D design software because I’m fast enough to iterate on what I want and I’m not hindered by the software. Just an interesting parallel

[tedchirvasiu]

I think it is more about knowing key shortcuts to navigate rather than just typing raw text from your brain.
Reaching for the mouse is a way bigger time and focus killer in most cases.

[_stevek]

The average typing speed is around 40wpm. 60wpm is statistically pretty fast. Idk where he got statistically moderate is 60wpm. I think there is a point where typing speed doesn't matter. In my opinion for programming if you are above that 40wpm I think you should be fine and I haven't seen a huge quality difference in the programmers who type considerably faster than that and who are in the 50wpm category. But it is your job so I think you should be slightly above average when typing.

[chargnmalazr]

Whenever i watch people type fast, i witness someone fucking up words and sentences over and over then fix, and fix and fix and fix. Then they get the three words they were trying to type. Overall it takes longer lol. I have witnessed this guy do the same thing in his videos when he writes code lol.

[bradleyfrueh]

I think what was said was anything above 80-90 is faster than you can think, so diminishing returns beyond this threshold.

[scottb]

Good point, I am by no means fast. Appoximately a 60wpm guy. I figure out so much by getting it on the machine. I think I know what it will do, but there is always something that I learn through getting the original idea coded.

[BloodEyePact]

I think you're both missing the point. Optimizing anything but your bottlenecks is a waste of effort, as you'll just pile up at the bottleneck or have idle time after it. If you know your typing is your bottleneck, improve it, otherwise, don't bother, instead, focus on being able to produce a more continuous stream of programming thoughts, study your language, data structures, design patterns, etc, so you don't have to pause to think, or optimize your build workflow so you aren't sitting waiting for your terminal prompt to come back.