I finally asked a senior dev why he always uses pen and paper first

Last Tuesday in a cramped break room at a Denver startup, he told me 'typing makes me skip the thinking part' and now I do the same before writing any code, has anyone else found a weird old habit that just works better?

3 comments

3 Comments

sarahh484d ago

Pen and paper forces your brain to slow down to the speed of your hand, which is way slower than typing. There's actually research showing handwriting activates different parts of the brain involved in memory and processing. That's probably why your senior dev feels like typing skips the thinking part.

torres.jason4d ago

Oh come on, do we really need to turn this into a whole neuroscience thing? Yeah, slowing down can help you think sometimes, but let's not pretend handwriting is some magical brain hack that typing ruins. I've taken plenty of notes by hand that I never looked at again. And I've typed out tons of stuff that I completely processed and remembered just fine. If the senior dev needs to write on paper first, cool, that's his thing. But let's not act like typing is causing some kind of thinking crisis for everyone who does it.

kevin_carr4d ago

Right, but isn't that research mostly about kids learning to write in the first place, not about grown adults processing complex code? Seems like a stretch to apply it to everyone typing out a thought.