There is the classic saying that “Practice makes Perfect”. This is partly true because it’s also that “Practice also makes you Permanent”.

Now usually comes the part saying that we need to do Deliberate Practice consistently for many years. The thing is that there is a multitude of ways to practice deliberately. There is no one size fits all formula applicable to all domains. And of course - people are different.

I’d like this article to focus on a single deliberate practice side - I call it the “Train Your Own Neural Technique” technique.

Yaron Wittenstein recaps the editor holy wars then tells his personal journey with the two editors and how he found a happy place somewhere in-between:

emacs has a very popular vim emulation named evil (branded as The extensible vi layer for Emacs). I was skeptical at first but gave it a try, and surprisingly things went smooth.

Did you know QWERTY was created in 1878?! I didn’t until I read this interesting piece by Yaron Wittenstein about how he found a new keyboard layout called Colemak that is much less RSI-inducing than QWERTY.

QWERTY typing never felt elegant for me. If always felt like something just isn’t right. Typing is supposed to be fun, and with Colemak it’s much more fun. The motivation wasn’t to type faster than QWERTY but to make typing more fun and less effortless.

Yaron Wittenstein:

The world of software is constantly changing at a very fast pace. Yesterday’s axioms might be tomorrow’s anti-patterns.

Newborn technologies rise to popularity only to become obsolete sooner than expected and hardware advancements make things that were considered science-fiction a few years ago possible.

The only certainty is that we don’t know what the future will bring us.

One mantra in this industry is always-be-learning. A message we don’t communicate well enough, however, is how you also have to be willing to let go of once-useful-but-now-limiting knowledge.

The internet is flooded with programming productivity articles. Isn’t writing a new one is kinda unproductive? 😉

Many of these kinds of posts are tool-specific. This one focuses on the principles instead (and still manages to mix in a few cool tools you may have never heard of).