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What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
291–300 of 398 posts
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#292I developed an RSI a few years ago, and I had to leave my job. It was devastating to lose both my career and my passion to an injury. Since then, I've been working with a friend on a new voice coding app called Serenade [1] that aims to enable anyone to program by voice. With Serenade, you can speak natural English voice commands like "delete second function" and "add class person". Not only can this be faster than t…
I was thinking along these lines. Wish i had time but good that you have made considerable progress.
My motivation was different though. I wanted to break barrier to code, make cleaner/efficient/consistent code, automated tests ingestion and for the ability to port code to other languages from metadata. If you could focus also on those lines too - it would be useful for the general community too.
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#293I developed an RSI a few years ago, and I had to leave my job. It was devastating to lose both my career and my passion to an injury. Since then, I've been working with a friend on a new voice coding app called Serenade [1] that aims to enable anyone to program by voice. With Serenade, you can speak natural English voice commands like "delete second function" and "add class person". Not only can this be faster than t…
Emacs programmer here, any chance it would be available there?
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely interested. I’ll check it out. Same boat, software engineer, my index and middle finger main knuckles on both hands inflame from the slightest use even after years of therapy, doctors visits, etc. Also tendinitis in both elbows/arms. Note to those who are pushing off fixing your ergonomics, don’t. If you feel pain, numbing, tingling; do not ignore it. Listen to your body, don’t be like me.
Had a similar issue. Then I went zerocarb and it faded fairly quickly.
0 carb is the thing!
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely interested. I’ll check it out. Same boat, software engineer, my index and middle finger main knuckles on both hands inflame from the slightest use even after years of therapy, doctors visits, etc. Also tendinitis in both elbows/arms. Note to those who are pushing off fixing your ergonomics, don’t. If you feel pain, numbing, tingling; do not ignore it. Listen to your body, don’t be like me.
I'm 23 and have been using computers very heavily for the last 10 or so years - probably an average of 6 hours a day. During a particularly intensive day of typing last week I started getting pain in my right hand. I had to resort to hunt-and-peck index finger typing to get the feature I was working on finished. I'm horrified, it feels like I'm way too early in my career for something like this to happen, but I guess…
I had the same problem. I narrowed it down to moving my pinky to type things like (). Default keyboard layouts are awful for programming. You type a lot of symbols and they're on weak fingers that require weird hand movements.
Using a keyboard with a programmable firmware lets you move those keys elsewhere, and then you can type them with strong fingers. I use my left thumb to activate a layer that turns jkl; into ({}), which has helped a lot. (I also moved the shifted numbers down to qweruipo -> !@#$&*`~, and brackets to m, -> [].)
I also have keys for macros like := and !=.
Finally, backspace and common symbols like - and _ are on my pointer finger (ErgoDox EZ, so I get a few extra keys in the middle), and meta, space, and enter are on thumb keys.
It takes a bit of time to get used to, but I type faster than on a traditional keyboard now AND with less pain.
Would still like to completely kill the mouse from my life, however.
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#296All these people talking about repetitive strain injuries and other joint issues have a deeply valid stance on this issue.
My best advice is that prevention is better than cure (or treatment). Remember, if you are computer-locked, to aim to do wrist stretches as well as look out your window (or any far distance) to exercise your eye muscles.
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 23 and have been using computers very heavily for the last 10 or so years - probably an average of 6 hours a day. During a particularly intensive day of typing last week I started getting pain in my right hand. I had to resort to hunt-and-peck index finger typing to get the feature I was working on finished. I'm horrified, it feels like I'm way too early in my career for something like this to happen, but I guess…
Ergonomic keyboard and mouse. A split keyboard is a huge win. When you sit with your hands in front of you, they don't naturally want to go in towards the center. They want to be offset a bit. Below the desk keyboard tray -- Look up an ergonomics diagram. You aren't supposed to have your hands going up to get to your desk. It's supposed to be a 90 degree angle. Going mechanical. I run Kailh Silvers, which are incredi…
> Staggered keys are just a remnant of old typewriters.
It's true (the Sholes & Glidden introduced that) but just for the record, some quite old typewriters had ortholinear keyboards, like the Smith Premier:
https://www.antikeychop.com/smith-premier-no1
They eventually lost in the market, however.
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#298This won't help anyone who has lost the use of their hands, but I have some advice for touch typists who use a standard keyboard like a laptop or typical desktop keyboard: don't bend your wrists. Of course most people know about the ergonomic advice to have your keyboard at the right height so your wrists don't have to bend up or down. But I often see people typing with a horizontal bend in their wrists so that their…
i learned touch typing in school, but i never really picked up on it. it just felt uncomfortable. i could not get enough strength into my fingers to push down the typewriter keys we used and the wrist felt uncomfortable. i did get ergonomic keyboards when available, they definitely make a difference, but they were not always available. (i never even considered that, but i wouldn't have been able to carry them to school where i had to work on a random terminal instead of my own workspace using unix workstations which weren't even compatible)
so eventually i just started typing with the index fingers and thumbs only.
i don't actually see the point in touch-typing for programmers. programming requires more thinking than typing. it also uses more special keys that touch-typing is not really adjusted to, so i don't feel like i am loosing any productivity by not being able to type as fast as a trained touch-typist.
and in light of the stories here, i consider my early uncomfort as a warning sign that stopped me from making things worse.
as others said: if you feel uncomfortable, fix the uncomfort, no matter how small
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#299That story of how the doctors just dismissed her pain as delusion is terrifying. Doctors are supposed to be people of science, but one of the very fundamentals of science is to acknowledge that you don't know everything, that your current knowledge is just a theory that can be improved upon. I find there's a tendency among doctors to think they know every possible disease, and if someone comes along with one that doe…
Psychosomatic diseases are a real thing though. You can have real physical symptoms. Last year my muscles started to « shake », with lots of skipped heartbeats (extrasystoles). After all the checks the doctors said the classic « it’s stress ». Well then I took a real break and embarked on multi month road trip on another continent. The symptoms disappeared nearly overnight. I think I experienced a burnout but it mani…
Unfortunately for most people taking a break like that is impossible. I’m sure stress is a major factor in many of my health problems but the biggest break I can take is an hour or two to myself once a week.
Re: What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
#300This won't help anyone who has lost the use of their hands, but I have some advice for touch typists who use a standard keyboard like a laptop or typical desktop keyboard: don't bend your wrists. Of course most people know about the ergonomic advice to have your keyboard at the right height so your wrists don't have to bend up or down. But I often see people typing with a horizontal bend in their wrists so that their…
i learned touch typing in school, but i never really picked up on it. it just felt uncomfortable. i could not get enough strength into my fingers to push down the typewriter keys we used and the wrist felt uncomfortable. i did get ergonomic keyboards when available, they definitely make a difference, but they were not always available. (i never even considered that, but i wouldn't have been able to carry them to scho…
I was supposed to learn touch-typing in school, but all I learned was how to game the system. To this day I still type with pretty much only index and middle fingers, even the space bar.
I don't feel particularly restricted by my _maybe_ slower typing with more frequent mistakes due to looking at the keyboard. Like you said, my job is engineering, not typing.