Paul Tibbetts

Sabbatical

I’m currently on a three month sabbatical from work.

I’ve been there for over five years and wanted a little break to work on my own things.

Personal

Touch typing - I’m learning to touch type. You’ll see me post about typing and keyboards more than I normally would.

Setting up my Mac - I’ve just bought an M3 Macbook Pro and I’m reviewing the apps I use.

Blogging - regularly. I’m viewing this as a project because it’s new to me, but I’d like it to become a normal everyday thing.

Getting back into fitness - running and cycling

Hobbies

Bikepacking - I bought a gravel bike to go bikepacking last year and I still haven’t been! I need to fix that.

Hiking - I’m always thinking about the next destination

Gaming

Helldivers 2 - for co-op

The Finals - for competitive PVP

Dave the Diver - for relaxing

Projects

Dev

Recommend.li - over seven years ago my colleagues and I wanted an app to send recommendations to each other, and we still haven’t found the right one, so now we’re making it ourselves.

Learning Go - because it looks better suited for the DevOps work I do nowadays.

Ops

Homelab - now I’ve got dedicated time to work on it I’m making more progress on my homelab than I have since I started it.

Reading

Non-fiction

Deep Work - I read this years ago and taking some time off to get some work done seemed like a perfect time to reread it.

DevOps Handbook - I really like this. I got to the part about “starting a DevOps movement in your company” and then started my sabbatical, so for now I’m reading the other books. I’ll finish it before I go back to work.

The Art of Monitoring - is helping to unravel the mysteries of monitoring web applications.

Fiction

Arisen Raiders: The Last Raid 🧟 - I don’t like the look of that title!

Blog

I’ve recently signed up to Micro.blog and it has a lot more features than my previous blog, so for now it’s my home on the internet.

I’m planning on using it for general updates and photos of bread of course, like any good blog, but also for recording design decisions in my development work, updates to my homelab and other nerdy things.

I’d like to make some progress on my own blogging system, and then these things can go there instead, but I don’t have that yet, so I’ll use Micro.blog to track my progress working towards that.

I thought I knew how to type.

For years I’ve been able to type without looking at the keys and I could get used to a new keyboard in hours, if not minutes.

Then I bought a new keyboard that looks like this:

and realised how wrong I was.

Hunter Pecker

It turns out I’d become extremely proficient at hunting for keys and pecking at them with my index fingers. My hands knew where all the keys were but I primarily used my index fingers to push the buttons.

Maybe the button was far enough away from the centre and I’d use my swearing middle finger. Or it was right on the edge of the keyboard and I’d use my ring finger. 

It worked for me for years, adapting from keyboard to keyboard and I could type at around 100 words per minute.

Using 100% of my brain

When I got my new keyboard I decided to learn it properly. 

I’d watch the videos, follow the guides and use the many different training apps available.

And I’d use my little fingers if I had to.

I considered switching to a more modern keyboard layout, one that was designed for better efficiency, but I wanted to learn the new keyboard first.

A new layout can come later, then I’ll be using 100% of my brain.

Training regime

I got my new keyboard on the 2nd of May and each day I would practise typing on keybr. 

It’s important to not overdo it, so I would spend about 30 minutes of typing and leave it for a few hours before having another go. I set the timer on keybr to 2 hours per day, the highest it would go, and stopped when I hit it.

Or I’d stop way before then.

Typing was painful!

It wasn’t a sharp pain, and it wasn’t severe, but years of only using 2 or 3 fingers to type had to be unlearnt and my little fingers had more buttons to press than ever before.

Some days it felt like I wasn’t getting any better and I would never learn how to do it, but each morning I would find my fingers a little stronger and that my muscle memory had adapted a little bit more.

Apart from that one time I went to type on my Macbook and I glitched.

Hands hovering above the keyboard my brain couldn’t find the relevant instructions to function and my whole body froze until it did.

keybr

I settled on keybr over the others because the guided lessons limited the keys I had to press and only unlocked the next key when it thought I was ready to progress.

Which was a bit weird, because my fingers knew where the next unlocked key would be before my brain told them where it was.

I felt like an octopus the way my hands moved without my brain ever telling them where to go.

In total I’ve spent 12 hours doing 730 lessons on keybr. The graph above shows my typing speed in green, accuracy in orange and the purple line shows the amount of keys unlocked. 

You can see the day I thought I knew what I was doing and then found out quickly that I didn’t.

Sometimes unlocking a new key would throw everything off balance and I’d have to adjust what I was doing. Or sometimes the new key would put something familiar on the map for my hands to anchor around.

After 12 hours of practising I’ve unlocked all the alpha keys on keybr and my brain’s adapted to the new layout. 

I was even able to type this blog post with my new keyboard!

Room for improvement

I’m not very fast at typing right now though.

This is where the other apps come in.

• monkeytype is for whole-word training
• type-fu is another app for whole-word training
• ngram is for typing ngrams (sequences of characters) to reinforce muscle memory

I’ll probably cut down my 2 hours of dedicated training to something more manageable but I’m going to need to keep at it. 

It’d be a bit embarrassing sharing my screen at work right now with me typing so slow and making so many mistakes.

Even worse is that I’m a programmer and I haven’t yet learnt where all my symbols are?!

Stats

Day 0: 100 WPM on my regular keyboard

Day 1: 15 WPM on my new keyboard

Days 1-7: practising on keybr for 2 hours per day

Day 8: 60 WPM on my new keyboard