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Bicycle skills
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoMost skills are bicycle skills - we do a lot of different things every day in this business. Its tricky to guess what we'll do more than once, that's the rub. I learn skills when I want to - not when the job demands it. I actually enjoy learning things, and do it more often than needed, to improve myself you might say but actually just because.
- stephengillie 14y agoMany would consider switching from Qwerty to Dvorak a bicycle skill. Typing a blog post or email can take much longer when you're learning to type in a new pattern. For some, the enjoyment of learning Dvorak, or the anticipation of being faster in Dvorak than Qwerty offsets the annoyance at the task's increased duration. For others, they have no such enjoyment or anticipation, and so the task is merely annoying. People will only pick up bicycle skills where their benefit (or perceived benefit) is greater than the annoyance they deal with.
- RegEx 14y agoPersonally, I wouldn't recommend learning Dvorak to anyone employed as a programmer. I would highly recommend it to high school/college students with some free time on their hands. Going from 100WPM qwerty to 30WPM Dvorak while learning was extremely frustrating for just non-critical tasks, such as chatting with friends. I wouldn't be able to handle going so slow when I needed to actually get stuff done.
- eru 14y agoI learned Dvorak as a student, too, and wasn't any fast at qwertz before. You can learn Dvorak, even as a professional programmer, if you just reserve half an hour each day on the side for the learning, and keep using your old layout for your day job until you are comfortable.
- agscala 14y agoI don't think switching to Dvorak is worthwhile. Most people don't have the capacity to actually squeeze out the few extra wpm that Dvorak gives you, and if you do, the benefits aren't extraordinary. Plus if you use Vim, either you'll have to remember where the original keys were on the keyboard and use it solely through muscle memory, or relearn.
- RegEx 14y agoLuckily I began the transition to Dvorak before I ever heard of Vim. The process definitely would have proved more painful with an additional set of muscle memory to override.
- jcoder 14y agoTo me (Dvorak typist for > 2 years), it's not about increased wpm. I'm actually not a fast typist. It's about greater comfort at the keyboard, because ~70% of my keypresses are along the home row, compared to ~30% with QWERTY. WRT Vim, I made the switch without too much trouble. In fact, I find the j/k on the left hand and h/l on the right hand useful.
- sopooneo 14y agoAnd most of us are programmers, right? Beyond some very low threshold I can not imagine WPM factors into programmer productivity. If you are a writer then perhaps it would help.
- tomjen3 14y agoI type in dvorak. If I don't my hands hurt. And go install emacs. Its shortcuts are easier to type in dvorak.
- eru 14y ago> Most people don't have the capacity to actually squeeze out the few extra wpm that Dvorak gives you [...] For me it's not about speed, but about ergonomics.
- cs702 14y agoMany would consider switching from Qwerty to Dvorak a bicycle skill. Are you sure? I'd consider typing in Dvorak a non-standard skill that would make me less productive with ~99% of keyboards in existence! This strikes me as about as worthwhile as learning to ride a non-standard dual-wheel vehicle, as a consequence of which it becomes much harder to ride regular bicycles.
- evoxed 14y agoI'm just one data point of course but after the switch I actually type much faster in qwerty as well. No looking, somehow when I need to I just switch without thinking. It's especially helpful when running a VM or when the bootscreen is tied to qwerty only.
- cs702 14y agoHuh. That's interesting. I guess it's akin to learning a second language...? Thank you for posting this -- it's changed the way I feel about learning Dvorak.
- plorkyeran 14y agoI had similar results, and I never even learned to type very fast on Dvorak. I think the key detail is that it forced me to break all of my bad habits I'd developed, and that carried over to qwerty.
- markram 14y agoAfter using Dvorak exclusively for two months I can't touch type Qwerty at all. I think you have to use Qwerty occasionally while learning Dvorak if you want to use both (I don't).
- starpilot 14y agoBut most of your typing is probably on your personal or work computer(s). The rest of the world's keyboards don't matter.
- eru 14y ago
- cdr 14y agoHasn't Dvorak been pretty thoroughly debunked as far as claims of speed? [1] is only the first google result, I can recall seeing quite a few articles on HN. Dvorak is more unicycle than bicycle. [1] http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/print http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/print
- starpilot 14y agoNo. That 1996 article is wrong on that point, and fluffy on others. It's straightforward to calculate finger travels for typing words on various keyboard layouts [1], and Dvorak easily comes out on top. Placing e on the home row alone is probably a significant improvement. Compare the home rows: asdf jkl; aoeu htns Placement of high-frequency letters, especially vowels, reduces finger movement and eases typing. There's no magic about it. [1] www.typocheck.co.uk/dvorak/
- aangjie 14y agoOT: I haven't read this specific article, but have been on DVORAk for about a year and am happy about it. But one of the problems i have noticed in arguments for and against these kb layouts is the hand size. they vary from individual, and i can easily see someone with a bigger hand not realizing the same efficiency improvement as i did when i switched over. *-- I switched over by trying Dvorak for an hour a day instead of the QWERTY i had used for about 3-4 weeks. I was a below average QWERTY user. Touch typist, but not fast/ not a lot of typing experience.
- decklin 14y agoThat article is mainly about the strawman argument that if Dvorak is better, then free markets are bad, because they lead to the kind of network effects that gave us QWERTY. (As a happy Dvorak user, I find this argument silly.) The author is very motivated to prove the premises false, for political reasons. I don't think it's very insightful.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoDvorak = old and busted. Colemak = new hotness. http://colemak.com/ http://colemak.com/
- godDLL 14y agoSeconded, for typing in code (with all the brackets and what not) this worked out better for me.
- ibotty 14y agoprogrammer dvorak is even better... :D
- SkyMarshal 14y agoInteresting, first I've heard of that. http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351059 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351059 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Programmer_Dvorak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Pro...
- tremendo 14y agoColemak puts the colon key above the home-row, and using Shift, which for Vim is rather unfortunate. I guess you can always remap it.
- eru 14y agoDvorak is old, yes. But busted? By the way, for international users the NEO keyboard layout might be worth a look, too. I'm just too lazy to switch from Dvorak to NEO, even though it would make it easier to type German Umlaute. Also my Kinesis Advantage keyboard supports Dvorak out of the box.
- pdelgallego 14y agoThe command line is a bicycle skills. Any programmer should learn it.
- stephengillie 14y agoDo some people really find the command line so difficult to use? I'm quite the opposite so I have trouble believing it. Maybe it's because the default black background makes it feel like we're throwing our commands into a "magical pit inside the computer", and waiting for the output, which will be an error unless the commands were perfect. That perspective is unpleasant. Maybe it would be helpful to visualize a GUI while using the command line, where instead of clicking on a menu or button, you have to type its name.
- RegEx 14y agoThe command line isn't difficult, but sometimes it's difficult to convince someone who has never "needed to use the command line" that they should give it a shot.
- ibotty 14y agounix is very user friendly, it's just picky who it's friends are... (having said that, with unix you can be extremly productive and it is (more or less) designed to be easily understood once you grasp some concepts.)
- prawks 14y agoI believe the reason people feel it's difficult is that a blank prompt is inherently not intuitive. There's no way you can hand someone a command line interface with an empty prompt and let them fiddle with it. They need to know what to type to start doing what they want to do beforehand, there's no way you can really "experiment" when you don't know where to start. It's very similar to many mainframe interfaces with non-intuitive commands. Many legacy IT departments have these. Questions like "How do I do X?" have answers from experts like "Type XKY= and then hit PF3". But that sequence of steps is nowhere on the current screen's list of commands, or in it's help documentation. You just need to know it. This is in contrast to a GUI where every single thing you can do (aside from keyboard shortcuts) is visible. I can hit a random button and see what happens. In a CLI, there are too many possible alphanumeric strings to try, so I can't do the same thing. (This is of course different if the prompt is not blank, and says "Type 'help' for help")
- sterling312 14y agoMy buddy at Microsoft tells me that in terms of automation, they use the dogma that if you need to do it once or twice, you just do it by hand. If you need to do it more than that, you automate it.
- wickedchicken 14y agoDijkstra says it even more succinctly: 'two or more, use a for'.
- crntaylor 14y agoThat is ever so subtly different.
- ht_th 14y agoThere are always only three cases: 0, 1, and many
- eru 14y agoA good rule of thumb. A more nuanced look proves even more helpful: There are graduations between manual and automatic. Semi-automation can be enormously productive, too. (And if you go beyond just automation, there's making your scripts bullet-proof under all circumstances. Which is useful, if you are doing tasks not only a few hundred times but even more often.)
- unoti 14y agoThe first bicycle skill I thought of for me when I read this: ZSH. I've seen people blaze through common tasks using ZSH that I do myself using an unholy combination of backscroll, mouse cut and paste, and cutting and pasting into my daily work notes in another window. I've never used zsh because I never wanted to take the time to learn it. vi is something I did take the time to learn, and it's paid off hugely over the last couple of decades.
- aangjie 14y agoAm just graduating from a novice to medium level user on vim. Consider myself a medium/novice user of the Bash shell (i.e: without awk/sed knowledge. but with find and grep). Is it worth switching to zsh at this point for me or can i just wait till i pick up awk/sed for text munging and progess on the shell usage??. I have come across zsh mentioned a few times, and given it a go too, but haven't been convinced/not understood what makes it better.
- ibotty 14y agoyes. it will be worth it. once you get past medium shell usage, you will appreciate many of zsh's features. you might have a harder time writing a posix compatible shell script though.
- aangjie 14y agoHmm.. posix compatibility is not high on my list. and hopefully, i won't need much in my future career. -- planning to learn some data analysis and mining.
- plorkyeran 14y agoPersonally I found zsh worth switching to even without spending any meaningful amount of time learning to use it. The better tab completion alone is enough to make up for the setup time and the occasional bashisms I try that don't work.
- 14y ago
- tsahyt 14y agoI think editor skills are a perfect example of bicycle skills. When you're effectively editing text all day long, learning an editor like vim or emacs really pays off in the long run, although it might be painful in the beginning. Bash scripting is another bicycle skill I think. The power of automating tasks is obvious but often it's easier to just type stuff in quickly rather than writing a script and let the machine handle the job. There are probably many many more, but those just popped into my mind right after reading the definition of a bicycle skill.
- raganwald 14y agoIs this another way of describing what Steven Covey called "Sharpening the Saw?" You can saw wood all day, and of course in the very short run you're always more productive sawing than sharpening, but in the medium or long term, you're better off sharpening the saw before you start cutting.
- Splines 14y agoI see "bicycle work" and "real-time work" as basically the same thing. In other words, you do "bicycle work" so that you can do "real-time work" successfully later. In programming terms, this would be like taking the time to learn your language so that you can effortlessly interact with it and think about it without really thinking about it. Or learning your editor so you can move around your document on a subconscious level.
- raganwald 14y agoImproving your editing skills (one of my glaring weaknesses) are a near-perfect example of sharpening the saw. You already use an editor, now you're learning to use it faster. I guess if we're going to play with the metaphor, learning to use a bicycle is not sharpening the saw, it's learning to use a new and better tool. So if we go with editors, learning to type faster is sharpening the saw, just like training to walk faster. But switching to Emacs is like learning to ride a bicycle where you used to run.
- yen223 14y agoIf we are going with 7 Habits metaphors, "learning the bicycle" would be like doing Quadrant 2 tasks, the Important but not Urgent tasks. Activities which don't bring anything in the short term, but will make your life easier in the long run.
- sharkbot 14y agoThis is a bit similar to the "exploration vs. exploitation" problem [1]. Is it better to explore new avenues in hopes of higher returns later, or better to exploit current knowledge of the problem to maximize current returns? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
- frankus 14y agoI often find myself wondering whether I should take the time to automate some little part of my daily work routine when it would be many times quicker (but less fun) to do it manually. If I do go ahead I often end up saying something like this to my coworkers: http://xkcd.com/974/ http://xkcd.com/974/
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoIn other words... learn vim?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DividesByZero 14y agoI've seen some organisations with an complete inability to learn these 'bicycle skills' in the interests of short-term savings because of misaligned incentives. Gigantic enterprise software/infrastructure projects with no integration test automation because it's cheaper/faster to throw on a few temp testers every time there's a release rather than taking a month to put automation on the whole stack. Role reshuffling to make a savings for the business unit quarterly earnings sheet. I think the other side of the coin to bicycle skills is something akin to technical debt - call it skill debt, say. Something could be done the right way straight away and the skill/process learned earlier, but because of a shortsightedness regarding cost, the cost to learn them actually increases with time until it's simply not possible without starting all over again. This is something that can affect organisations as a whole, not just individuals, and I think it's something technical and project managers in growing organisations ought to be aware of - get your people, ALL your people, set up with the requisite bicycle skills that benefit everyone.