natlight (u/natlight)

atomer · 9 months ago

Took me 1 year to rewire my brain to switch from Qwerty to Dvorak (I struggled with from RSI for nearly 6 years) and nearly 2 years to gain full speed. It is hard, very hard for the brain. It is mentally tiring to rewire your brain like this and you will do your job at a much worse efficiency (forget pair programming for a while). You need new keyboard stickers also. Great job at making this idea but it is not practical.

natlight · 9 months ago

I switched to Dvorak 20 years ago and I love it. It only took me about 2 weeks to learn and to pass my qwerty typing speed. I could actually touch type on either keyboard for the first year or two after I switched. I recommend not using stickers or dvorak keyboards at all, it helps you learn faster and your family won't get pissy because they can't use your computer anymore.

Also, it is not difficult to use other peoples computers. You can switch keyboards pretty easy these days on windows and mac. In fact, my very first computer (Apple IIc) had a mechanical switch to flip between qwerty and dvorak.

natlight · 11 years ago

Have you considered making a switch to a data team? I switched to a BI/DW team 5 years ago because I did not enjoy building corporate CRUD apps all day. Working data in a large enterprise is really more of a mental challenge than a programming challenge.

The coding work is so much more enjoyable, only about 5% of the it is UI, the rest is all design and working the data. I absolutely hated how long it took to do the UI part of a crud app, so much that I steered my career around it.

Data work is so challenging because you truly have to understand every process you are taking data from and come up with creative ways to make that data useful to the business. The BI team at my work may not be the most advanced java guru's but they are some of the most creative solution designers you can find in our company. They are also the team with the most experience and the most knowledge about our super complex business processes because you have to understand them all to produce useful analytics.

I also can't stress how nice it is to have SQL as the most used tool in your toolbox. I scoffed at it as a simple data query tool before joining a data team. I now know it as the most efficient programming language I have ever used. Sure it can take a lot of mental effort to develop a complex query but it is so much faster than putting that logic in any other language. You simply ask a detailed question of the database and it returns an answer set to you. You do not need to tell it how to get he answer, the optimizer takes care of that for you and it does a much better job than you could ever do (99.9999% of the time). No more coding endless series of loops. A couple dozen lines of sql could take thousands of lines to code in java/c#/ruby/python etc.

There is also a whole new world of data science opening up right now and corporations are cashing in. I will be learning hadoop and map reduce very soon so we can position our team to offer a competitive advantage to our business through big data. I will have to learn R and python because they are used to gather and work all that data. The future is looking bright for data workers.