Writing without seeing

Falling in love with Excel

I remember somewhere around 2020–2021, when I decided to learn to program. Back in industrial engineering I was obsessed with automating every project in Excel: statistical tests, all of it. I'd finish in record time because I had fallen in love with Excel and with that power of dropping things into cells and watching it all run on its own — covariance analysis, Student's t-tests, volume diagrams. I did everything in Excel.

And I always had this splinter in my head: I can automate myself even more. As the good lazy man I am.

The month before the code

Watching YouTube, a Platzi video came up nudging me to learn to program, and I decided: you know what, I have the strength and the knowledge to learn this. But before that, something was bothering me. I knew programming meant writing, and back then it really meant writing — not like now with my dear Claude Code, where we read more than we write. Back then you wrote, and you wrote a lot. And I didn't know touch typing.

So before I started, I gave myself one or two months of my life to learn to write without seeing. It was a challenging experience. I started from zero. I learned how to place my hands. Every day I dedicated half an hour to touch typing, and meanwhile I went through a course on the foundations of software engineering — understanding how these machines work, general knowledge, anything I could absorb while my fingers retrained themselves.

Numbers and AutoHotkey

Once I had finished learning all the letters, I had to move on to numbers. The numbers sit at the very top of the keyboard, and I noticed I had to move my hands too much. It was inefficient. And one thing was clear in my mind: in programming, you use numbers all the time.

I had to find an optimal way to type them without breaking my posture. That's when I came across something called AutoHotkey, which lets you program your keyboard: hold down one key and the rest of the keys change function. Suddenly I could write more than letters: I had numbers, symbols, fast cursor jumps between sentences. I even wrote a post about this story on Platzi's blog and shared how I configured my keyboard — giving a little back to the community that taught me to code.

Being slow to be fast

As I told in those posts, I became very efficient at typing. But I remember the months when I was in college and had to write long projects. A lot of writing. I forced myself to type without looking and it took me much longer than usual, but I treated it as practice. Something that took me 20 minutes typing like a chicken — using only two fingers — would take me up to an hour typing without seeing, because I was just starting.

That's how life works: you start something new and it will always be worse than where you already are. But that doesn't mean you should stay where you are now, because staying can be stagnating.

If I had kept typing with one finger, I'd have a normal speed for sure. But that would have been my ceiling. Without spreading the keys across my fingers, always depending on looking at the keyboard, I would never have been able to master numbers and arrows the way I do today.

Dvorak: unlearning to keep going

And that same leap toward efficiency hit me again in 2023. In 2024 I bought a split keyboard with no letters on the keys — a beekeeb Toucan 36 — and gave myself a new challenge: start over from zero. It hadn't even been five years since I learned to type, but I had heard of something more efficient. It was called Dvorak.

So there I was, working, forgetting everything I had learned about QWERTY, going slow again. I had reached 80 words per minute, but something kept warning me: typing on QWERTY was starting to hurt my hand. And I really liked Dvorak — all the vowels on one side, the most-used English consonants on the other. It seemed magnificent. QWERTY was designed to keep old typewriters from jamming; that doesn't make sense today, when we have computers.

So I spent another one or two months learning the layout I use today. I now do over 80 words per minute. It's one of the skills I'm most proud of, because I had to be disciplined. I had no talent for it. I had to do it, and feel slow every single time I practiced.

I can say learning touch typing is the most efficient thing I've done in my life. It lets me finish work, run analyses, do everything faster — sometimes even faster than the AI. It lets me memorize shortcuts for everything. Avoid the mouse as much as possible.

Unlearning is harder than learning

Reflecting on it, learning this is what lets me think and have the words come straight out onto the computer. It's striking how you go from not knowing to being so fast. Of course it took me time to reach in Dvorak the speed I had in QWERTY, but every kind of pain went away. Dvorak feels more natural to me when I think in vowels and consonants, and for writing in English it's the most optimal thing there is.

I won't lie to you: many times, halfway through, I thought about going back to QWERTY. I felt awful about how slow I was. It's twice as hard when you already had a keyboard in your head and you change it, because when you start from zero you take advantage of all your fingers being virgin in muscle memory. Once you've already learned, switching layouts isn't just learning. It's unlearning.

And that's one of the best lessons I take away from this whole road. Unlearning is much harder than learning. But it's necessary to keep moving forward. It's the beautiful thing about life, and something that defines me.