Until, from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me, a light so brilliant and wonderous, and yet so simple. Deep practice, eradicate errors and deep practice again. I alone succeeded in discovering the secret of bestowing skill. Nay, even more, I myself became capable of bestowing mastery upon apprentice matter.

It could work.

At the end of august 2009, while i was reading about the importance for a programmer to touch type, i found out many programmers could type at 80 wpm and above. I tried myself and consistently scored 60 wpm or below. I have been spending many hours a day at the keyboard since at least 1996. How could it be i am not as fast? I already knew about the importance of practice, but i did practice for years, didn’t I? Well, uhm, no.

Think of the career of a professional football (soccer) player. How does he get there, does he play all the time for years? Actually, he spends most of the week training: stretching, pushups, sprints, weights, long runs, ball work, etc… Only a small percentage of time is indeed to play short games and the main game on sunday. That’s because play alone can only push your performance to the upper end of the range set by current skill. It’s not going to push you to the next level, to the next order of magnitude, and it doesn’t keep you from developing bad habits. And that’s where i got, very fast at typing in my very flawed 7-fingers posture. Not able to improve any further, not even in more than 10 years.

I really wanted to get better, so the questions were How? and How long will it take? I didn’t know the answer to the latter but the former was by then clear in my mind. Find a keyboard dojo, do keyboard katas and take the needed time. After trying a lot of viable solutions i found my dojo at www.typingweb.com. To add some salt to the challenge i switched keyboard layout from italian to U.S., which is quite better for programming, and i started practicing daily with their courses, routinely taking tests to record my progress. Two pomodoros a day for the first two months, then one, then again two when i was reaching the end. Always striving to get 97% or above accuracy at the higher possible speed for every single lesson.

Now, five months and about 120 pomodoros of deep practice later, i am writing this to shout to the world that IT COULD WORK. Next i’ll be moving to vim katas, while still having some fun at www.typeracer.com, because you never really stop to practice right?!

Yours sincerely,
ten fingers typist
american layout
80 wpm average
up to 100 wpm under a good moon
Federico.

]]> http://federico.galassi.net/2010/01/27/how-i-did-it-touch-typist-in-five-months/feed/ 0 http://federico.galassi.net/2009/09/02/code-katas-programmers-deep-practice/ http://federico.galassi.net/2009/09/02/code-katas-programmers-deep-practice/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:27:46 +0000 federico http://federico.galassi.net/?p=148 I’ve recently blogged about talent and how it’s grown through disciplined, committed, error focused practice at the edge of your ability, known as deep practice. I guess now it makes sense to approach it from the perspective of programming: What’s programmer’s deep practice? Unsurprisingly, inspiration can be found in the great japanese culture, people who highly value discipline and self improvement. Specifically i’m talking of martial arts. If you were to learn, say, karate you would go to a dojo and perform katas. If you happen to be a programmer, you can go to a coding dojo and practice code katas.

Code katas, a term first coined by Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, are small programming exercises geared to hone a specific programming skill. Traditionally, they tend to be algorithmic like parsing or visiting graphs but could as well aim to improve understanding of particular programming paradigms, like functional or object oriented, or a specific language. Also, as remarkably pointed out by Matteo, katas can be crafted to master a certain technology like web or database. While, as you may guess, Coding Dojos are sites, groups or communities which propose and maintain collections of katas hopefully with solutions and reviews.

So, how do you practice? I suggest you solve a kata, review your work, compare it to other solutions, share your code with others and discuss it. Then solve it again trying to take a different path, balance pros and cons, then solve it again and again, until you feel you internalized the essence of the problem. Finally, you can move to another kata. If it feels like a lot of work, then you got it right. No question mastership requires time and effort but, then again, masters are those destined for greatness.

Resources

• Katacasts
• 21 Code Katas by Dave Thomas
• Lots of Code Quizzes with Ruby Solutions
• Matteo Vaccari’s Technological Katas
• Coding Dojo Code Katas
• Corey Haines Video Solution in Ruby of String Template
• Uncle Bob Code Katas (search “kata”, ie bowling kata)
• Micah Martin on Code Katas and Video Solution in Ruby of Langton’s Ant
• Micah Martin’s BattleShip Tournament
• Google Code Jam
• Jeff Atwood on Code Katas
• Steve Yegge on Code Katas
  
• Peter Norvig on Deep Practice