What’s the easiest way to boost your career in software? Learn to touch type

I recently bought a "ninja" keyboard, where the labels are on the front of the keys, not the top. Looks "badass" according to a nearby 15-year-old. While the keys are technically labeled, in practice looking at them is useless, especially in anything less than bright room lighting, so they are, for me, effectively blank.

As a touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it. There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.

So, I bought keycaps with letters and numbers on them and replaced them on just those keys. Much better.

I never found typing rate to be the limiting factor in software development. Organizing code as a whole and making sure the code itself will be easy to follow six months from now takes more time and effort. Not to mention tricky bugs that take over a day to hunt down and slay. I wonder if "The Literate Programmer" made touch typing a priority?

And here I thought it was knowledge and historical perspective.