Friday and Saturday were filled mostly with things that support my development work, but are not development itself. Very important stuff, but still leaves me feeling unproductive despite the number of things accomplished.

First, a brief philosophical foray. Why am I doing all this? Well, it’s MMM‘s early retirement plan coupled with one of my own ideas: regular sabbaticals.

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Wow, this is only the first day of this diary series and already things are moving so quickly. Let me quickly write up the three things that are the highlights of the day.

1. I have started writing an app!

   A simple app for practicing memorization, recall, and touch typing at the same time
   via jonasninja/MemoryTyper.

It does what it says on the tin.

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I’ve wanted to transition from a Java developer to a front-end web developer for a while. The front-end is exciting (new technologies!) and demanding (there’s simply no way to fake work: your code is either changing things on the page, or it’s not), and thus perfect for me.

Well, it is happening. I am becoming a front-end web developer. I am not going to give up on this. And, though I am not well-prepared for that sort of work, I will not give up or wait. I’m going to start now.

This diary series will serve as a place where I can record what I am learning each day that I put in any significant amount of effort into learning the skills and information necessary for making that transition. I hope it will serve as a good record of my hard work and intention, and maybe serve as encouragement for others who are trying to make the jump, too.

Well, what am I waiting for? The clock is ticking. Let’s get started.

I have made much more progress than I anticipated in just 4 weeks. I now regularly type at 50-55 words per minute, and sometimes hit 65. This is learning a new keyboard layout in addition to learning touch typing. I have for typed exclusively in Colemak for at least two weeks, and find that my old QWERTY muscle memory very rarely interferes. The S, which was one of the hardest transitions since it only moved one key over, is second nature now. Of course, I still make many mistakes. And interestingly, I cannot type well when tired. The new muscle memory hasn’t gone that deep yet.

I have noticed that I do my fastest practices early in the morning, and on the first try. The following tries are inevitably slower. I suspect it is because I attempt (against my conscious will) to type faster than my hands have learned in the succeeding tries, but there is no such impulse in the first try.

The most important thing I have learned is the need to keep your fingers on the keyboard. I previously typed by looking at the keys because I floated my hands above keyboard and needed to realign often. But by keeping most fingers where they need to be, I hardly ever lose the keys. That’s the one trick I’d recommend a beginner touch-typist to focus on for fastest improvement.

I’m learning Colemak. It’s like your typical keyboard, but you switch the letters around. There are tons of other blogs out there that give a fuller history, but I will give you a brief one here: Because of the physical limitations of mechanical typewriters, the best layout of keys at the time was an inefficient, uncomfortable staggered layout where frequently-used keys were placed in hard-to-reach places. In fact, it was built to make the typist slow. None of those reasons are valid for computer keyboards, but the ol’ QWERTY layout on an unergonomic staggered keyboard is now the standard.

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