How only 10 minutes of typing practice a day will help you become a better remote developer
When you go remote your communication changes to being mainly text.
Which means you will be doing a lot of typing.
As a developer, your two main tools are
- Your brain for your problem solving
- Your keyboard for getting the solution out of your brain and into the real world I struggled for years with getting what I had in my brain into text before something distracts me and it all goes away.
The thing that was mainly getting in my way was my poor typing skills.
Since typing is the foundation to writing code, practicing typing is an essential skill as a remote developer.
And since it is a skill, you only get better at it if you practice.
Two easy steps to start
First, set off time every day to do the practice
In the beginning, I scheduled 10 minutes in the morning to “warm up” for the days’ programming.
❗️The main focus here is accuracy. Not speed.
When you get the accuracy, speed will come as a byproduct.
Writing code faster
There is a a big difference between writing code and regular text.
Code has all these weird special characters, like ;, [], {}, #, etc.
The perfect place for practicing your typing skills while writing actual code is typing.io. Choose a language and start typing. All the special characters included! No help with closing braces from your IDE.
Their byline even says “typing practice for programmers”, which hits the bullseye.
Conclusion
Did only this 10 minute practice make me a better developer?
Actually, yes. As a side effect of being able to write faster and more accurate, I started writing (and rewriting) more code.
And a big part of me feeling fulfilled as a developer is knowing that my poor typing skills are no longer getting in my way when I need to turn an idea into code.