Learn to type before you learn to code

The way you type is not related to the way you think, and therefore code.

I must say extensive computer use (and mainly coding) is what made me type fast & accurately enough (according to the various tests found on this blog post).

Knowing how to talk in a foreign language will help you write better in this same language. I'm not sure that such an analogy can be drawn from typing/coding.

I know some dyslexic people coding pretty well and I'd say that most of the time it's a problem of accuracy.

You should be able to touch-type all those keys. The braces and square brackets may take some getting used. I find these characters to be the toughest: |+=

I have to really stretch my right pinky to reach those keys; slows me down and impacts my accuracy.

If you are a non-typist and you are going to learn to type you should learn Dvorak or Colemak. For anyone who already knows Qwerty it isn't worth the time to re-train, but if you don't know any layout yet it's a good opportunity to chose an optimal one.

Agreed - this is what I did.

I didn't know how to type properly for a long time, so when I finally decided to learn to type, I had the same thought: learn to type using something that's actually designed for typists.

I looked at a few layouts: Dvorak, Colemak and fully optimised QFMLWY. I chose Colemak because QFMLWY takes too much effort to install (Colemak is supported in Linux and OSX out of the box and is easy to install on Windows) and Dvorak, while an improvement over QWERTY, still seemed archaic to me (having been created before computers).

I absolutely love Colemak - it does exactly what it advertised to do. Its very comfortable, alternating hands a lot and moving the most used keys to strong fingers and easy to type keys. I'm also often amazed by how much I can type with just the home row (in fact, I have a cheapo laptop with a cheapo keyboard that i use and the home row keys are most worn of all, except maybe that one spot on the space bar). Of course, since I never touch typed qwerty, I can't compare.

For learning, I used a blank DAS keyboard. Took about two weeks of pain, but I feel the blank keys really helped force me not to look at the keyboard. Now I don't care about key markings and happily use qwerty markings on my Colemak keyboards.

Great thing. Pass a test at http://www.ratatype.com/typing-test/ and print a typing certificate, put in CV.