Spoiler alert… It’s because your time actually matters.
Let’s get off on a tangent here. It’s summer 2014 - and I’m finally getting some confidence in Vim. I feel like I can build static sites with Jekyll faster than the average dev, and I frequently talked about ‘building websites in a day’. While this was a healthy, competitive attitude toward output, I wasn’t really focused on long term production.
Fast forward a couple months, and I’m worry-free about my coding future. A buddy and I go skateboarding. I decide to try and ‘go big’ and I end up going home with a shattered wrist (got some good video though).
For the first time ever, I was literally unable to code. I could not produce for my clients.
Needless to say, I got through it. But it shook me up to realize that one simple wrist injury could take so much power away from me. Do I need to stop skateboarding? Should I sleep in a wrist brace? All these questions.
Present day — I still get pains in my right wrist up to the base of my middle/ring fingers. And that’s something I have to live with.
Start Caring About Keystrokes
Ben Orenstein has a great talk about using Vim to save time. And in that talk he mention how many keystrokes it takes to save a file in Vim (5) and how many times a developer might save a file in a decade (250,000). That being said each decade, saving files alone, we are using 1,250,000 keystrokes.
Wow, I just gave myself arthritis writing that.
With my wrist problems, I started to appreciate the importance of keystroke management. Go ahead and jump over to Ben’s talk to pick up some speed techniques in Vim, and also a good mindset on looking to the future of many years of healthy programming. I completely agree with Ben and his thoguht process behind finding ways to shorten your typing and increase your output.
So why use Markdown?
Because Markdown ultimately saves you time and keystrokes, making you a faster programmer with more longevity. Stop destroying your hands/wrists with mindless code repetition, ESPECIALLY if you’re using jekyll daily like I do.
How does Markdown save you time?
Markdown is literally designed around the most repetitive tasks in formatting online — text editing. That being said if you are a developer with a blog, you can save yourself so much headache and stay in the terminal heaven while you work.
If you’re a career developer, longevity and speed need to be two of your priorities. As you continue to improve those areas, you’ll be more stable and able to take care of yourself and your family.