Last week I was neck deep into some code + good ol SQL and it was a serious jam! I knew mighty well the thing cooking in my head but the hands have mind of their own. It dawned on me that I am a terrible typist. Had I known how to touch type I could have accomplished a lot more without having to slog the weekend.
Now most the people who know me would say I type pretty fast but unfortunately It's just a five finger varant of Hunt and Peck as its equally bad. My fingers know a little bit about the keyboard layout from more than ten years of typing however, all ten of them hardly ever work in tandem.
Technomad Prafulla and I have been together for more than a decade now. The man has taken professional typing lessons even before computing "happened" to both us. I used to make fun of him back then about this, but boy was I WRONG!
This had to change! And then the hunt for skills improvement began, I was looking for developers who are equally good typists. And by good I don't mean 40wpm good. I mean 60wpm and above good. None Nada Zilch at the workplace. Time to check my "extended" workplace, the internet and first thng I find is this life changing post by none other than Codinghorror, Jeff Atwood. This pointed me to another acridly honest comment on non-typist programmers by Steve-Yegge and here I am a "Convert" so to say.
I am sure there would be many like me who'd want to learn to touch type like the pros and let the mind do what it does best Imagine, Think, Create. Whenever I try to do something creative I set out with a pen and paper (yeah right engadget). This gives my mind the creative freedom I love. While writing my fingers don't have to think, they write. And help me think!
The Plan
The plan is to spend an hour each day. For starters it'll be at TypingOnline a UK based site that assists improve your typing skills. Once I feel at home with typing without looking at the keyboard then I'll move to a better and more hardcore training course and maybe some typing games too.
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The Hardware
Since I am in India, a land of snake charmers and elephant riders who are happy with whatever incompetent IT retailers throw at us I am going to pick the only mechanical keybard avaialbe out there. The TVS-e Gold, they've renamed it to TVS-e Bharat USB. It's gonna be noisy, but I'll live with that till i can find something eqally good and less noisy.
Do pour in with what you think about all this "Getting Better" plan.