Original poster here. I'm reposting this blogpost from Steve Yegge because it's so relevant, we're seeing students who haven't been told yet that touch-typing changes your career, and the upgrade you get from it is immense.
I'm skeptical. Developers spend most of their time thinking, not typing. Unless you are literally a 5 WPM hunt-and-peck typist, the lack of touch-typing will not be a bottleneck.
I'm not typing a word and thinking, typing another and thinking some more. When I type I'm mostly typing at speed, and the shape of what's in my head and trying to get onto the screen is changing in time with the typing. Sure, there are fits and starts, hesitation, backtracking. Sometimes I manage a few tens of seconds, sometimes it's minutes and sometimes it's even more. The crucial thing is that when I've formed the idea in my head it needs to get out, the quicker the better. Fumbling with the keys hurts. Hitting the wrong key hurts. Too much time, too many errors that need to be corrected, and the thoughts decay or run away from me and I need to get them back.
For me, using Facebook cookies in the same browser as work stuff blows my mind. I specifically write in the onboarding of my employees “Create a separate Chrome or FF profile to use your Facebook and other personal browsing”, and only half respect this rule, interns being specifically bad (experience workers do want work/home isolation). They receive quite a scolding when I catch them, but the damage is done: All websites have immediately registered who they are associated with, who their colleagues are, etc.
Stringent security rules and obnoxious firewalls exist because people don’t respect cool rules.
Have you tried our plugin, Requirement Yogi (on the Confluence side), and if you have, can you share how you would position it on the market, especially compared to R4J for example?
We are the authors of Requirement Yogi. It is an extension of Atlassian Confluence (Server/Data Center), the famous intranet for companies, which addresses your versioning question.
- I created it when I received my usual 1000-page spec document in Word, in a waterfall project…
- So the software is excellent at numbering requirements (which addresses your first question about itemization), making links between places in the docs, managing dependencies, and letting people free to format their document on Confluence pages,
- We have excellent feedback from customers, but we are still lacking some enterprise features such as managing a million requirements, or inheritance (customers often have a core product and they derive a custom version for 10 or 50 customers).
What I love is that we’re at the articulation between free text and structured database: Customers want to write free text with images and widgets, and they still want structural queries, such as the completion % of their project, but based on the Jira story associated to each couple of requirements… I love what I’m doing!
