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Typing Practice for Programmers

speedcoder.net

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Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#101

Post by BigJono »

rosstex wrote: post #93
BigJono wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been toying with the idea of making a spiritual successor to this for years, always been too busy with work though. It's one of my favourite games of all time! Maybe there's some artists/developers here that would want to collaborate to reduce the time burden a bit? :P

I used to make my babysitter play while I watched, because I was astounded she could do so well on hard. Now I play on X-Treme and see if I can make it to the end.

I remember when I was a kid X-Treme seemed impossible, I thought the developer put the difficulty in as a joke.

Nowadays I load the game up once every few months and I tend to beat X-Treme first shot every time, unless I get unlucky with the toxic sharks. It seems you need around 110-120wpm and decent reaction times to finish it.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#102

Post by riffic »

er, nope.

  $ curl -I https://www.speedcoder.net/
  curl: (7) Failed to connect to www.speedcoder.net port 443: Connection refused

  $ nmap -p 443 www.speedcoder.net

  Starting Nmap 7.40 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2017-01-29 17:18 PST
  Nmap scan report for www.speedcoder.net (52.36.71.201)
  Host is up (0.066s latency).
  rDNS record for 52.36.71.201: ec2-52-36-71-201.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
  PORT    STATE  SERVICE
  443/tcp closed https

  Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.20 seconds

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#103

Post by jasonm23 »

mgcross wrote: post #90
Insanity wrote: post #70

This test is a bit..silly to me. I am an enthusiast of mechanical keyboards, own a few, and have enjoyed typing for as long as I can remember. On top of that, I can type quite fast - depending on which keyboard I am using as it does affect me a bit I reach about 720cpm on my mx blues (ducky keyboard) and about 670cpm on my KBP keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches, which is my slowest board. (on the 10 fast finge…

Agreed,if the bottleneck is CPM/WPM ,you probably need better tooling in the form of scaffolding/boilerplate. But for those who can't touch type this could reduce the cognitive load of hunting-pecking. I need something like this (or typing.io) that will let me configure auto-complete so that it matches Sublime.

Maybe you need (to make) a typing tutor in Sublime?

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#104

Post by kinghajj »

riffic wrote: post #102

er, nope. $ curl -I https://www.speedcoder.net/ curl: (7) Failed to connect to www.speedcoder.net port 443: Connection refused $ nmap -p 443 www.speedcoder.net Starting Nmap 7.40 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2017-01-29 17:18 PST Nmap scan report for www.speedcoder.net (52.36.71.201) Host is up (0.066s latency). rDNS record for 52.36.71.201: ec2-52-36-71-201.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com PORT STATE SERVICE 443/tcp closed…

Unfortunate. With Let's Encrypt, there's really not much excuse not to support both HTTP and HTTPS.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#105

Post by jasonm23 »

redsummer wrote: post #56
_m8fo wrote: post #16

In my opinion there's no better practice than playing Typing of the Dead. If losing in a game irks you even a little you'll definitely improve your typing speed by playing if your current speed is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslf5hJMtvs

Is there a version that can be played on macOS or pi? I'm guessing it would be under emulation.

I setup Dreamcast emulation to run TOTD on a Mac last year. It was OK... Not perfect though.

I ended up switching to Speedtype on Emacs, which I've found to be far more useful, and very easy to add exercise and drills.

https://github.com/parkouss/speed-type

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#106

Post by jasonm23 »

menssen wrote: post #63
collyw wrote: post #2

Coding by typing fast never seems like a great idea for me. Isn't there a saying "weeks of programming can save hours of planning". Plus a decent IDE will eliminate the need for this type of thing.

1. I have found, when you know what the next word is, that there is a typing-speed line that if you are above, just typing the thing is faster than using IDE autocomplete. It also disrupts your flow less. I am convinced, although only based on anecdotal evidence, that a lot of the vim/other-editor vs IDE debate is significantly based on how fast you can type. 2. There are a significant number of programming tasks whe…

To your second point, I think simply encouraging this practice will see benefits.

There are numerous ways to achieve results here, and typing speed falls behind simple automation in many cases.

Getting a habit to automate away repetitive tasks is, in my eyes, the number two skill a programmer should develop and rely on.

(Number one being relentless improvement of skills.)

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#107

Post by dualogy »

quotemstr wrote: post #55

Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…

Sure but the more you do this, the more tools/commands/libraries/modules have to ideally both document and remember, realistically neither..

Cognitive overload. Shell commands with their args ... core syntaxes for half a dozen languages ... a couple base class libraries and 0-2 frameworks for each ... plus all your own abstraction/automation stuff on top? Admittedly this all used to be quite a bit simpler back in a sole "Win32-app world": VisualStudio+MSDN=done, no shell to speak of, no web layer / stack, One GUI Way, etc. But 15-20-years-ago ain't coming back for at least another decade.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#108

Post by mgcross »

iamdave wrote: post #35
ternaryoperator wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's not the fast part that's useful as much as the ability to type braces, square brackets, underscores, = signs, left/right arrowheads without having to look down to locate the key.

Why? Has that historically-on your team-proved detrimental? I'm interested to hear the anecdote on this one if that's the case.

Mistakes derail me much more when I'm sharing my screen or pairing. Once I make one, my confidence is somewhat shaken and I spend an inordinate amount of time on accuracy rather than the task at hand. Stupid, I know.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#109

Post by steinuil »

redsummer wrote: post #56
_m8fo wrote: post #16

In my opinion there's no better practice than playing Typing of the Dead. If losing in a game irks you even a little you'll definitely improve your typing speed by playing if your current speed is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslf5hJMtvs

Is there a version that can be played on macOS or pi? I'm guessing it would be under emulation.

There was in fact an OS X version of TotD, called "Typing Of The Dead: Typing Lariat", and it was an universal binary too; I think I still had it on my mac a few months ago.

I don't think it's sold anywhere anymore; you should be able to find it on some abandonware website, with a bit of googling.

The menus are in japanese but the text to type is all either in english or at least uses english characters. If you want the proper english version you could try with wine, the tests on winehq seem to report decent compatibility.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#110

Post by wapz »

Insanity wrote: post #70

This test is a bit..silly to me. I am an enthusiast of mechanical keyboards, own a few, and have enjoyed typing for as long as I can remember. On top of that, I can type quite fast - depending on which keyboard I am using as it does affect me a bit I reach about 720cpm on my mx blues (ducky keyboard) and about 670cpm on my KBP keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches, which is my slowest board. (on the 10 fast finge…

You should check out typera.net for in my opinion, more realistic typing tests. I just tried the 10 fast fingers test and got 750 on my first try on a cheap keyboard (I maxed out at a tad over 700 on typerA where it uses random sentences albeit much more difficult generally).
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