Typing Experiment Resumed

I stumbled across a project this week that I had abandoned shortly after completing it a couple years ago.

Back in 2022 I had read a book titled The First 20 Hours in which the author, Josh Kaufman, discuss his attempts to learn how to type only by touch. This intrigued me because although I am able to type quickly enough, I've never really attempted to improve this skill with any intentionality. But the idea stuck in my head and I became more and more curious about the limits I had placed on my capability. So, I researched touch typing, and keybooard layouts, and custom built keyboards.

I decided to challenge myself to not only learn to touch type, but to change keyboard layouts, AND build a minimalist keyboard to learn it all on.

This isn't a story about the details so I'll sum it up.
- I built a customized Ferris Sweep keyboard (34 key split keyboard with no key labels)
- I created my own 4-layer keyboard layout based on Colemak-DH
- I practiced touch typing for over 30 minutes a day for over a month (about 20 hours)

I succeeded in achieving my goal. I got to about 30 wpm in tests, and was good enough to take it into the office to put it to real use. Unfortunately after a couple weeks of taking it back and forth into the office, the USB connecter broke.

I had already moved onto another, bigger challenge (finishing my bachelor's degree) so this very minor setback became a very low priority on my long list of things to do. Therefore, it sat... for over 2 years, until this week.

I had a spare 30mins, so I decided to solder the connector back on. (Past-me was looking out for present-me and made the wise decision to leave the connector in the cord! Good job past-me! Thank you for being forward thinking!) After a bit to fiddling, to confirm that everything still worked, I decided to take a quick test to see how much I had forgotten. I'm nowhere near as fast as I used to be, but after a couple days, I'm actually impressed at how quickly I am re-learning.

Typing Experiment Resumed!