A Typing Odyssey
Hello reader! Happy August!
As my last post indicated, this summer I have been devoted to improving several important skills and habits. One such skill I have been refining is my typing speed. I came to the realization this May that I was lacking the motor skills required to keep up with my thoughts. Previously I had been relying on visual focus to locate the keys, but I began to wonder if this unfamiliarity had been quietly preventing me from writing and building things I was on the fence about. Because of this, I committed to fixing my deficiency through daily practice, hoping to lower that barrier between my thoughts and the things I wanted to create.
So, how did this journey start?
Let us first rewind to January 2022 back when I was still a high-schooler. The Wordle craze had just started and I, like many others, obsessed over it; I enjoyed each day thinking through strategies, honing my own personal starting word, and playing the game with my classmates in Mr. Hacker’s Econ class. Unfortunately, after a brief honeymoon phase, the game started to reveal itself as lacking purpose—there was no pull to play because I didn’t feel like I was learning anything useful, just applying the same strategy of guessing the most likely letters day by day.
I soon became more interested in the spinoffs Globle and Worldle. They are both daily puzzles, but they teach interesting and useful concepts: the names, shapes, and locations of the countries and territories of the world. As an American who hadn’t left the country, I didn’t know much about geography, but it had been an interest of mine to learn the countries of the world. When I first started playing the games I usually had to rely on a map, and sometimes using one was embarrassing because I had the completely wrong notion of a well-known country’s location or shape. Because of this reliance on a map, I looked forward to the day where I wouldn’t need one, and it was the prospect of eventually needing no map that revealed to me an amazing learning opportunity.
What does this have to do with typing?
May 23rd, 2026. I am playing the Globle and Worldle and a thought crosses my mind, “I have been playing these games for four years, and have improved tremendously. I wonder if by now I can identify every country’s silhouette?” So, I looked online for a suitable website and found a quiz called 249 Countries. The quiz gives the user 20 minutes to type the names of all 249 countries and territories represented by ISO 3166-1. Cool! I started the quiz, and I recognize the first country instantly. But when I went to type the answer, I realized how truly inefficient I am at using my fingers to type. I know the answer! But my knowledge isn’t the bottleneck; getting the answer on the screen is. That day I managed only to answer 95 countries in the 20 minutes, making my typing deficiency painfully obvious. That was when I vowed to learn touch typing.
I looked online for a suitable educational tool, one I could practice with each day, and quickly realized that my answer was right in front of me in the form of something I already cared about. As long as I exercised good typing habits within the 249 Countries tool and tracked my progress, I would have a final goal: completing the quiz in 20 minutes through daily improvement. It was also convenient, since the quiz was capped at 20 minutes, giving me a clear time window to practice in. So, I dedicated 20 minutes each day on that site, while focusing on accuracy and resisting the urge to look at the keyboard. I saw improvement each day, and chasing the goal of completing all countries in 20 minutes was thrilling (a required rate of 4.8 seconds per country). After three months of daily practice, I finally completed all 249 countries in the same 20-minute test without looking at the keyboard, compared with just 95 when I started. Over those three months, I began identifying limitations of the quiz and used what I learned from practicing with it to build my own tool in parallel.
What did you build?
The original 249 Countries was not designed as a typing tool—it naturally lacked features that encouraged good typing habits. Because I had been using it for an alternate purpose for months, I began to see the many issues that prevented it from being a typing tool. Some of those issues were:
- Typos were neither penalized nor tracked
- Delays between attempts prevented rhythmic typing
- Alternative names were submitted automatically
- The list of valid country names was unknown
I built my version naturally around the practice loop I had developed over three months. The user is shown three countries at a time: the previous, current, and next. The previous reminds the user how they performed, while the next allows the user to look ahead and maintain their rhythm. Any incorrect keystroke forces the user to correct the mistake before moving on, marking the country as yellow corrected rather than green correct. I also provide a searchable list of countries with their formal names, accepted names, silhouettes, Wikipedia pages, and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.
I still really enjoy solving the Globle and Worldle every day. Because of these games, I identified an issue, practiced toward a concrete goal, built a better tool, and eventually reached my goal. The result is that I am now a more confident and skilled typist.
Thanks for the read! Have a good one.
P.S. Stay tuned in the Projects tab!