Type Testing My Way To Coding Creativity
For most of my life, typing has been something that I did without any intentionality, despite its prevalence in my everyday work. I would consider myself to be an above average typist but I never actively sought to maintain or improve my typing skills. However, throughout the course of Flatiron School’s Software Engineering Bootcamp, I have begun to regard the act of typing in a different light.
As a software engineer, my job has been to actively translate my thoughts and spoken language, into computer recognizable code. I have felt that the faster and more accurate that this act of translation can be, the more productive and creative I become. The more I can match my own thought process and stream of consciousness, the more ideas and content I will be able to develop and create. And most importantly this applies to any context in which a keyboard is required, not just programming.
With this in mind, I began to look for resources that I could use to create an improvement plan and in this article. At the beginning of the bootcamp, I averaged of 70–80 a words per minute. Now at the end of the course, and after dedicating myself to improve my typing abilities, I can consistently reach a WPM of 100–110. I’ll share a few of my favorites resources that I have been using to practice, besides the most common advice of improving posture, using touch typing, and taking typing lessons.
I was introduced to Monkeytype by students in my cohort at Flatiron and what began as a curiosity, has become a competition, with them and myself. Monkeytype provides different typing challenges to test your typing abilities. The most popular are the timed challenges where you are tasked with typing a randomly generated collection of the most commonly used words. Afterwards, they provide various analytics and information on your typing patterns that you can use to further finetune your approach in the future. After creating an account, your stats are recorded and you can view your own leaderboard and history over time. Personally, I find it immensely rewarding to receive real time feedback on my typing, apply that information, and then push myself to improve over time. Monkeytype has now become a part of my warm up routine before I start programming for any extended period of time.
2. Keybr
Keybr offers typing lessons that match your own skill level and are made of random subsets of the full alphabet of letters. The size of the subset and individual letter frequency is determined by your areas of need. For example, if I am struggling to type words that contain the letter O, it will recognize this over time, and start to provide more subsets with Os in them. I think that Keybr is great for this reason but I prefer to practice typing with real words to mimic real typing situations.
3. TypeRacer
TypeRacer places you in direct competition with other typists on the internet. You compete to see who can write a selection of words the fastest, the default being famous quotes. The faster you can type, the faster your car will go. As stated above, I think getting into the competitive spirit and gamifying the experience of typing is one of the quickest ways to create a habit of improving your typing speeds. And its a lot of fun too!
4. Minimize Mouse/Touchpad Usage
Something I did not realize was how much I used the mouse and how much that can interrupt my workflow. Becoming more acquainted with keyboard shortcuts and using them to navigate through my operating system made me faster at completing any necessary tasks. In the links below, you can find shortcuts for the most popular operating systems and I would encourage spending time learning the shortcuts of your most used apps as well.
MacOs: Link
Windows: Link
The faster one can type, the more a programmer can code, the more an author can write, the more content-creator can produce.
Having to stop to search for the right key to press or to correct mistakes causes interruptions that disturb your thought process. I do not foresee the standard of using a keyboard to communicate and complete tasks changing anytime soon and typing fast and accurate is an immensely valuable skill that can provide significant productivity and creativity boosts. I have found great success using the resources and tips described above and will continue to use them in journey of improving my typing abilities.
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Feel free to check out my GitHub profile if you’d like to see any code I’ve written.
Have any questions or any typing tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment! If I don’t get back to you quickly, its because I’m busy typing on Monkeytype ⌨️.
