Mm you need vim in your life man. It connects words and movement directly to your brain
Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
221–230 of 233 posts
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe some people confused wpm and characters per minute... For writing software having 100% accuracy with numbers and special characters is more important than speed. I don't think 100 wpm is real for coding.
This is why I built wpm.silver.dev. Theres no tolerance for typos on code and way more special characters than MonkeyType. 120 on monkeytype can be 50 on wpm
By far the biggest two things screwing me up here are problems with the app itself: The single-quote opens up the browser's quick-search, leaving the app and screwing up the flow, and the automatic yellow text that moves at a constant speed is extremely distracting if it ever gets ahead of me because of how much more visible it is compared to where the cursor actually is. And it's almost guaranteed to happen on the ones that use single quotes because of the first problem.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
same on both. On dial-up; I learned to touch type so I could insult my opponent after killing them, but before they re-spawned and could attack me again in a video game.
StarCraft multiplayer here - had to get messages out quickly in between controlling units.
Starseige:Tribes - Typing in spare time on a ballistic trajectory... Though a good deal of that was also tapping out 3-4 keystrokes for the "V" communication tree, something that I think a lot of games could benefit from even in this era where there's enough bandwidth for voice chat.
With the amazing amount of client-side scripting the game supported, people made their own variations on the communications system, even carefully playing audio clips over one-another to get new speech.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're working with a language you're not-so experienced in, then the completion for `// read data from file f into x` is going to be significantly quicker than looking up the documentation for this.
Read data into x? Taking into account that the file may not exist or error half way? Taking care that your buffer doesn’t overflow or simply eat all your available ram? Do you only work with trusted inputs?
Most the time, yeah, actually.
Also- in my experience so far, LLMs do a far better job of accounting for things like this than I do.
For example I had claude 4 write something to recursive search the whole filesystem on a windows 11 machine and included a few checks for windows 11 file system specific things I wasnt aware of
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even come close to groking how one types without home row hand placement. How does that even work? Where are your hands if not starting at home row?
I’m not sure if this how other people do it but my hands sort of float around as I type rather than being fixed in one place. They gravitate towards home row but I was never trained “classically”. I type (peak) 140wpm. my understanding of the homerow style is that you have a sort of assigned finger for each key. while I type, there is plenty of overlap between fingers and it's constantly adapting based on where my ha…
Well said. I also "float", had no formal training and peak around 140-150wpm.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#226I've never been able to type faster than 35 wpm and I have no idea why. I was taking the same typing lessons as the other kids in the 90s and have been writing code since high school. I can even solve a rubix cube in under 30 seconds. Feels bad man.
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Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#227Mm you need vim in your life man. It connects words and movement directly to your brain
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Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#228Typing fast is an underrated skill for developers. A lot of the value added by various intelligent tab completion and LLMs is easily replicated by typing variable and function names at 100+ wpm. Not a fan, however, of the desire to disparage the "right" way of doing things that's done in this blog. I type the "proper" way, home row and all, and can reach 150+wpm with high accuracy. So, based on this evidence, you're…
When I was in the 8th grade (back in the 1900s), I took a typing elective class, because I figured if I was going to be in front of a keyboard typing for a living as a programmer, I should learn to do it right. That was a rare very good decision for kid me back then, and it's paid off ever since.
Was mandatory at my high school; the only way to avoid it was a once-a-year typing test that was not advertised - you had to ask or hear about it. If you could do 35 wpm without errors, you didn’t have to take the class.
I probably had enough cachet with the teachers that I could have weaseled my way into taking it until I passed, but I did pass it, so problem solved.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe some people confused wpm and characters per minute... For writing software having 100% accuracy with numbers and special characters is more important than speed. I don't think 100 wpm is real for coding.
This is why I built wpm.silver.dev. Theres no tolerance for typos on code and way more special characters than MonkeyType. 120 on monkeytype can be 50 on wpm
I like it but it's not really a comparable/usable result. My IDE auto suggests a lot of things and a lot of "words" could be reduced to a single tab key press.
For example, in golang, I have not typed a full if err != nil {} in years. "err.nn"+tab auto completes to the if, and "err.re" auto completes to the if + return err. To be able to compare what speed I really code at, I should be able to use these to speed things up.
Same as calling functions, I rarely type the full name and instead use tab auto complete. Same for for ranges, "nums.forr" autocompletes to the for i,n := range nums {} form.
Re: Typing 118 WPM broke my brain in the right ways
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only time typing speed has helped me is when people try to gish gallop me when I’m messaging them and I’m able to gish right back faster than they can respond. That’s…not exactly healthy though.
May I ask when you first heard that term?
i asked because the term was used in american news last week - not sure exactly when, and unfortunately, i can't find the clip from last week to link here.