...typing?

Let me explain.

Shortly after I got my first computer in early 2013, my best friend introduced me to typeracer.com (what you see above!), a fun website where people race against each other by typing quotes from famous books, movies, and songs. His speed of 100 words per minute (wpm) seemed almost inconceivable to me at the time, and I became obsessed with trying to beat him.

The online typing community has exploded in the last decade—its growth fueled by the proliferation of online gaming and mass adoption of mechanical keyboards. According to SimilarWeb, the two most popular typing sites (Typeracer and 10FastFingers) got a combined 11 million visits in December 2020. It's a surprisingly popular niche.

How fast am I?

I rank among the top 5,000 fastest English typists in the world, averaging more than 160 wpm. This puts me in the 99.9997th percentile.

The charts you see above represent the totality of my competitive typing history: monthly averages of the over 17,000 tests I've taken during the past 8 years or so through TypeRacer. Although I don't practice nearly as much as I used to, my speed and accuracy continue to improve.

Typing taught me how to write.

It might be a bit unconventional, but I attribute my love for the arts to typing. Feeding my brain the works of great philosophers, screenwriters, musicians, and novelists through TypeRacer led to tremendous improvements in my critical thinking, writing, and reading during my teens. I absorbed my sense of language through thousands of snippets of great literature and media. (Sounds a bit like deep learning, if you ask me...)

Being a fast typist (not surprisingly) comes in handy in a lot of ways: with coding, writing—and even as a cool party trick occasionally. That being said, even though I can get my ideas on paper faster, I'm still limited by how fast I can come up with those ideas. Being able to pluck more keys on my keyboard doesn't mean I can think any faster.

What keyboard do I use?

I get this question a lot.

My daily driver is the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB). It was designed in the 90's by a professor at the University of Tokyo specifically for system administrators and programmers.

A traditional keyboard has 104 keys, whereas the HHKB only has 60. This allows it to be perfectly centered on my desk and not interfere with mouse movements. It's highly ergonomic.

What you can't see are the Topre keyswitches behind the keycaps.

Instead of having a thin rubber sheet behind each key, mechanical keyboards have a distinct mechanism. This allows for more key travel, tactility, and an overall better typing experience. Topre is a beautiful hybrid between mechanical and rubber-dome keyboards: it has a mechanical device, but also a thick rubber sheet between the backplate and circuit board. The result feels incredible to type on, and the signature "thock" sound with each keystroke produces delightful auditory feedback.

Here's a full minute if you're interested.

“Cowboys in the western United States leave their horses when they die. But never leave their saddles, regardless of how long they need to walk in the desert. Saddles are interfaces that are deeply adapted to our bodies whereas horses are consumable items. It should not be forgotten that computers are consumables nowadays, but keyboards are interfaces that we can use through our lives.”

- Professor Eiiti Wada