ScarTech » Continuous Improvement http://www.scartech.net The musings of a confessed code junkie and a game geek. Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:34:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Strong Typing http://www.scartech.net/2007/11/27/strong-typing/ http://www.scartech.net/2007/11/27/strong-typing/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 01:15:31 +0000 Tim http://www.scartech.net/2007/11/27/strong-typing/ Are you a touch typist or do you hunt and peck? For a developer, touch typing can really help keep from having to move your eyes back and forth from the monitor to the keyboard. Although I’m sure there are plenty of programmers who get along just fine without touch typing, I refuse to believe it’s more efficient to hunt and peck. To me it’s sort of like using the mouse too much. You can get things done moving from the keyboard to the mouse to point and click, but learning an application’s keyboard shortcuts can help make the application easier to use. Touch typing can have the same effect.

There are commercial products available to help you learn the keyboard layout, online tutors, and there are even some online games to help you learn. Did you know the longest work you can spell with one hand is stewardesses? Well, at least it is for touch typists.

 Like Truman Capote said. “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

]]> http://www.scartech.net/2007/11/27/strong-typing/feed/ 1 Old School – A Warning http://www.scartech.net/2007/10/23/old-school-a-warning/ http://www.scartech.net/2007/10/23/old-school-a-warning/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:52:53 +0000 Tim http://www.scartech.net/archives/10 Nostalgia is defined as a longing for the past. Many things give me a feeling of nostalgia: old pictures, 80′s music, Robert Aspirin books. The list goes on. It’s just not my development environment, and it better not be for you either. As developers we should be moving forward with not just with our technologies, but our tools as well. I remember writing Java code using the Programmer’s File Editor and compiling at the command line. No debugger. No forms designer. I used good old System.out.println. Not exactly the most efficient use of my time. Today I wouldn’t think about writing code without a good IDE. With features such as Intellisense, modern IDEs are a godsend. There are plenty of good, free development environments available. Here’s a few:

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