If you’re anything like me, you’ve wished it would be possible to get better at things that make you money by playing a game. I realized recently after reading Steve Yegge’s Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret and reflecting on where I learned to type that such a game exists. It turns out that as programmers we are lucky to have such a game. These magical games are called MUDs. I spent most of my middle school to high school years playing MUDs and still hop in to see what’s going on occasionally. I didn’t realize it until recently that I can attribute some of my success as a programmer to all the time that I put into them. They may not seem like much more than text-based World of Warcraft at this point, but that isn’t really the point of this post. The point of this post is to justify the thousands of hours I spent on them talk about how spending some time playing one can actually improve your performance on the job as a programmer.
Typing
This one is probably obvious, but MUDs force you to become a fast and accurate typist. The only way to interact with the game is through text, so you won’t survive very long if you have to look down to type out the commands to heal yourself in the middle of a fight or are constantly hitting backspace to fix typos. Your progress and success is directly tied to your typing skills and as you spend more time in-game you naturally progress from a hunt-and-peck style where you think about individual letters to thinking in blocks of words and sentences that just seem to appear on screen with little effort.
Sure you can use some of the cool new web apps like typing.io which uses actual code and gives you detailed reports on how you did and where your problem areas lie, but MUDs can be incredibly addicting which is the main thing you need to get better at typing. You need to practice, a lot, and playing a game that makes you want to come back day after day is a great way to force yourself into practicing. I don’t really think it is worth spending time trying to explain why typing is important for a career as a programmer, but if you’re curious, Steve’s post above should be enough.
Scanning
The big realization I had that spurred this post was that MUDs also train you in scanning. Sure, it might be obvious that reading quickly is something you will pick up as you spend time mudding, but you also get better at not reading. With all the information that is scrolling on the screen constantly, it is just as important to know what you can ignore as it is to know what is important. Why this is particularly useful for programming is that we mostly have the same interface to our programs we’re writing as the MUD: a black screen with colored text. Unsurprisingly, being able to recognize and ignore unimportant text or quickly focus in on important text transfers incredibly well between the two domains.
Usually, this is something simple like quickly finding a method on screen, but occasionally you spot exactly what we are looking for in fast scrolling logs. You also find yourself being able to read in chunks rather than having to read every piece of the line. All of this really comes in handy when you’re debugging and/or tracing through multiple files – the less time you spend to find the what you’re looking for the better. Speed Matters.
Of course, MUDs are also fun and not just for becoming a better typist and scanner, but if you’ve ever seen or paired with someone who navigated a codebase with what seemed like impossible speed, there are few things better to train that skill than picking one and playing it for a few months. I’m sure you will see progress almost immediately and you’ll have a lot of fun while you’re doing it.