Wwe Here Comes The Pain Save File
Jacinto Dieujuste
In the summer of 2020 I experienced quite severe wrist pain that limited my ability to type for extended periods of time. In order to fix it I decided to relearn typing: I switched to Ergodox EZ keyboard and Colemak layout, and I started typing with all my fingers. Here's how I decided on this approach and how it went.
While we certainly won't find software developers on the list of most dangerous professions, it doesn't mean that as programmers we're free from any health concerns. Prolonged sitting, lack of physical activity, and constant exposure to screens is more than enough to cause some long-term problems.
Having worked as a developer and manager for more than 10 years, I'm not a stranger to some of these issues. The first time I started having problems with my wrists was around 2016. Occasional pain over time grew into a larger issue, where at times I had to take an hour break from typing, because it was too painful.
Around that time I bought my first ergonomic keyboard. I replaced my beloved Apple Magic Keyboard with a split, mechanical Matias Ergo Pro. It was a wonderful keyboard, but unfortunately broke pretty quickly (and the replacement I got broke even faster...). I had it long enough to help my wrists recover though, and after a few months I moved back to Apple keyboard, and I forgot about the pain for some time.
Our arms and wrists are very flexible, but not every position is equally comfortable or easy for them. The most natural position is when the arm is straight and the palm of the hand is turned towards the rest of the body. When we rotate our palm so that it can lie on the desk, the forearm is twisted, and you can feel that the muscle is more tense. Basically every modern keyboard (besides some very niche vertical keyboards) forces us to use the less comfortable position.
That's not all: there are 2 more dimensions in which we put a pressure on our wrists. The first one is left-right rotation. The most comfortable, resting position for our wrist when it's in straight line with the forearm, like a natural extension. Whenever we rotate the wrist, left or right, we put a pressure on it. Again, most modern keyboards require us to rotate our wrists and keep them in this uncomfortable position.
The 3rd, last dimension is up-down. The resting position here is when the hand can be loose and hang comfortably slightly below the wrist level. When we put our wrists on the table, we force our hands to be at least on the same level, if not higher, which pus a pressure on the wrist. The healthiest position when using a keyboard is to float our hands above the keyboard level. Unfortunately very few people do that, instead we put our wrists on the table or palm rest. Thick keyboards or keyboards that have a positive tilt (like the Apple keyboard on photo below) make it worse.
So we have 3 issues here. The only keyboards that offer a full solution to all the problems are vertical keyboards, but again, I've never seen anyone using them. However, it's still possible to minimize the strain on our arms with using ergonomic keyboards:
The first one is that when I was learning how to type as a kid, I didn't learn proper practices. Instead of using all 10 fingers, I relied mostly on 5: both middle and index fingers, left thumb, and occasionally ring fingers. That still allowed me to type at 110WPM (words per minute), but it forced me to move my hands a lot.
The second reason is that I have small hands and the standard, staggered keyboard layout makes it hard for me to reach some keys, especially Y and [. Every time I need to press one of these keys I need to extend my finger and move my hand a bit.
Finally the last reason is the QWERTY layout, which is a crime against fast, comfortable typing. No, I mean it, it was specifically designed to slow down typists 150 years ago when physical typing machines could get blocked if letters next to each other were typed one after another. Yet due to that archaic limitation we're still using that keyboard layout till now.
As you can see on the photo above, Ergodox EZ is a rather unusual keyboard - it is split, tented, has a number of additional keys, and has an ortholinear layout. You can also see that I rearranged the keycaps to that it matches the Colemak layout I decided to use. All of this makes it very unique, and yet every single feature makes this keyboard great.
The first couple of weeks were tough. I knew my typing speed would go down, but it was very frustrating. I helped myself by rearranging the keys so that I could look at the keyboard and find the key I need to press, but it still was unbearably slow. Yet, after the first month or two I started feeling comfortable with the new way of typing. I stopped looking at the keyboard, I made fewer mistakes, and most importantly my wrists stopped hurting.
The best example from my setup are tap vs hold. The home row keys on my keyboard as act letters when I tap them, but when I press and hold them they act as modifier keys (Cmd, Opt, Ctrl). This allows me to use common shortcuts like Cmd+C (copy) or Cmd+S (save) without having to reach keys in the most bottom row of the keyboard. Instead my shortcuts are N+C (copy) or N+S (save). It required some trial and error, but it's been a real game changer for me. Here's my current setup if you're curious.
Back in 2020 I made a video about injuries and health problems that happen to programmers. In my late 20s I started having problems with my back, wrists and neck. I've realized that if I want to be able to work until retirement age, I have to change my habits. I upgraded my working environment so that I can sit/stand and type comfortably, and I started moving more - I cycle and jog regularly.
Getting a proper, ergonomic keyboard and customizing my setup so that I can keep my wrists in a relatively comfortable positon was an important step. Of coure the best solution to preventing carpal tunnel syndrome and RSI is to type less and I work on that too, but I can enjoy typing long articles without having to worry that pain in my wrists will be dictating the time of my breaks. Ergodox, while not a cheap keyboard, is worth its price. I can't remember when was the last time I felt any pain in my wrists, and that gives me hope that I'll be able to keep coding for the next couple of decades.
Over the last two decades, suicide has slowly and then very suddenly announced itself as a full-blown national emergency. Its victims accompany factory closings and the cutting of government assistance. They haunt post-9/11 military bases and hollow the promise of Silicon Valley high schools. Just about everywhere, psychiatric units and crisis hotlines are maxed out. According to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are now more than twice as many suicides in the U.S. (45,000) as homicides; they are the 10th leading cause of death. You have to go all the way back to the dawn of the Great Depression to find a similar increase in the suicide rate. Meanwhile, in many other industrialized Western countries, suicides have been flat or steadily decreasing.
And these are just the reported cases. None of the numbers above account for the thousands of drug overdose deaths that are just suicides by another name. If you widen the lens a bit to include those contemplating suicide, the problem starts to take on the contours of an epidemic. In 2014, the federal government estimated that 9.4 million American adults had seriously considered the idea.
Whiteside was born in Colville, Washington, 40 years ago, the first child of parents drawn to adventurous work wherever they could find it: building an oil pipeline in Alaska, raising cattle and conducting child health screenings in rural Washington, driving trucks through the Midwest. By the time she attended junior high, in Minnesota, Whiteside had enrolled in six different schools in three different states. But instead of turning her bitter or shy, all the moving seemed to sharpen her empathic powers. She became one of those canny little people who could intuit when those around her were in pain.
Before her junior year, Whiteside transferred to the University of Washington so she could learn from Marsha Linehan, a legend in the field of suicide research. Linehan had pioneered a powerful form of treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, which trains patients how to reroute their suicidal impulses. It can be grueling, emotionally exhausting work that requires people to spend several hours a week in individual and group therapy, and therapists to do check-in calls as needed throughout the week. Linehan had a principle for all of her students: Clients came first, your own life came second.
And then Whiteside sprinted nose-first into the wall of the modern-day behavioral health care system. She took a clinical internship in the psychiatric department of Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle, an under-resourced, grim institution. The main goal, she kept hearing, was triage. She was there to stabilize suicidal patients, nothing more, because no one had the time to do more.
Whiteside was tasked with probing patients for their treatment history and state of mind. There was the man who killed his dog and shot himself in the stomach. The immigrant who set himself on fire. The college student who had been found walking in the middle of a street clutching a teddy bear. Each one, she felt, was desperate for any form of help or kindness.
It was December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, and the 3989th Quartermaster Truck Company had been stuck for days in a farmhouse in Bastogne, Belgium, surrounded on all sides by German forces. In the quiet moments, when the sky was the color of bleach, and snow blanketed the ground, First Lieutenant Jerome Motto prayed for Allied planes to save him and his fellow soldiers. And just often enough, C-47s would appear with the precious cargo that kept them alive. The men would dash outside, trying to avoid detection or dodge enemy fire as food, clothes and medicine fell in gigantic bundles tethered to red and blue and green and yellow parachutes. To Motto, it looked like a sky wearing polka dots.
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