No, typing can be the bottleneck

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2024-09-30 10:30:10

One of the eternal laws of the internet dictates that as soon as one person says they have a new thing that lets them type faster — a keyboard, a keyboard layout, an editor configuration, etc. — somebody else must say: “but typing is not the bottleneck!”

What the second person means is that the first person is wasting their time. They’re optimizing something that’s not slowing them down. Typing is not the bottleneck, because “typing is perhaps 0.5-1% of my programming time”. Programming is thinking, talking to people, planning, researching, is what incarnations of person #2 are saying. And if you think your keyboard is holding you back from thinking, well, you’re wrong.

But here’s what I need to write and type besides code: commit messages, pull request descriptions, emails, tickets, comments on tickets, code reviews, documentation, Slack messages, notes, journal entries, RFCs, design documents, requirements.

Effort, that’s the important one, not raw speed. It doesn’t matter if you can type 90 words per minutes or 130, but if it takes you effort to type something and, if given the choice, you’d rather not do it, then we have a problem.