Marcelo Calbucci

    If you know my coding style you probably know how much code I can crank out per day. I sometimes brag I'm one of the fastest developers in town (and there is no lack of developers in Redmond ).

    The fact is that I'm not the fastest on the keyboard, or the best at creating amazingly "simple" code, or very good at creating architecture that yields good results. My secret to success is optimizing the heck of my typing. Seriously.

    The story goes back to when I was 15 years old and I was starting to learn how to type using a book -- about typing -- my mother had. I had a computer for just two years and was a master of using just two fingers. But I decided it was enough (mostly because I've got an Apple II and I saw another guy typing really fast, which impressed me).

    Anyway, during my self-taught lessons of typing, I would type entire phrases of books and every time I've made a single typo, the rule was that I had to backspace all the way to the last punctuation mark. Forcing me to type the same sentence over and over until I've got it without any mistake. That not only taught me how to type, but also how to minimize the probability of hitting the wrong key.

    A lot of my early life with computers involved very mechanical tasks, like entering 3,000 numbers into a spreadsheet for my Grandfather furniture-manufacturing company, or typing the addresses of 8,000 hotels. Quickly I learned the power of optimizing your typing style.

    Today, I might spend a whole day just thinking and trying how I'm going to create something that requires a lot of typing. At the end, it might have taken longer, but I learned the best way for sure. The next time I have a similar task I already know what to do and since I've been doing this for over 15 years I have a bag full of tricks to be very proficient at developing code.

    Believe it or not, but sometimes I even use Word, Excel, Access, JavaScript, C# and other tools to create code. Yes, I use C# to create code to myself. And after IntelliSense I can wrote hundreds of lines of company without having to type more than a few characters per line.

    Now, after all this rambling I just want to say that I think Visual Studio 2008 will be the biggest revolution in developer productivity of the last 10 years. And I just used it for a couple of hours so far!