How I get distracted, and how I stop it
I started by writing a blog entry for another blog that I wanted to work on called “Embedded Economics.” It was pretty random. I told myself: just keep writing. And I did for a page’s worth of drivel.
My point—or rather hypothesis--(which I never got to) was that there were a million books on software teams and relatively little on individual productivity. So at 9:11 I attempted to verify this hypothesis by Googling terms like “Team software productivity”—without the quotes--(lots of hits) and “Individual Software Productivity,” likewise, – relatively few, quickly trailing off to matches that really had little to do with software.
At 9:15 I found a site called Teamly, for team productivity that looked intriguing, so I stopped there and browsed for a couple of minutes.
Then I thought: I’m covering territory that’s already been covered by others. There’s Joel Spolesky. And Jeff Atwood (I didn’t remember his name—I first Googled for ‘Atkinson Software’ at 9:24 but drew blanks). Then I remembered the name of his blog—Coding Horror—so I Googled for that. Google displayed (helpfully) not just the home page, but a few popular pages. Scanning them I saw one called “The Keyboard Cult”, probably at 9:25 And I was off.
Speed-reading my way down the post, I found links to prior posts:
My love affair with the keyboard goes way back:
Well the “We are Typists First” link really got to me, because it’s part of something that I’ve been thinking about for Embedded Economics: that programmers need “basic skills” the same way pianists and baseball players do. And one of the basic skills is typing. So I followed that thread, at 9:26.
Reading the “We are typists first, programmers second” post (which I agreed with violently), I found links to a number of other posts. Here they are, along with my time stamps:
Twenty minutes spent following these random deer tracks. And stopped because I decided to post to RSILT.
RSILT, you are my savior.
Meanwhile, I found some things that I really want to follow up on.
For example:
This a great site for practicing typing. It’s the one I have been looking for. I tried one of their exercises—a passage from “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and found my typing speed was 59 WPM with 93.3% accuracy. How good is that. Well, high scores in the last hour ranged from 164 WPM to 107! And the highest scores: from 188 to 136.
At TypeRacer you can type on your own, or be matched against someone else and type competitively. Whoo!
Others cited by Jeff in We Are Typists First, Programmers Second are:
- Type Racer
- Typer Shark
- Dvorak, Keyboard Layout of Champions:
- Colemak keyboard layout
- TyperA
- Das Keyboard with blank keys
- The Typing of the Dead (for PC)
- Put Down That Mouse. Seriously. It's a crutch.
- Typingmania (warning, Japanophiles only)
Somehow I got to Stevey’s Blog Rants where Steve Yeege talks about “Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret” – lack of skill in typing by some programmers.
Then this post: Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing « Whatever
And this: Coding Horror: Fear of Writing
And this: “Blogging about Blogging” an encouraging post about how to blog.
It’s now 10:22. I have killed nearly an hour and a half on this post. BUT I’ve learned some important things. And my trail of bread crumbs is memorialized.
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