Why I built a typing trainer to "debug" my hands (and break the 80 WPM plateau)

Dustin Shoemake — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:56:40 +0000

Hi Everyone!

As a software engineer, my keyboard is my primary instrument. But for the last three years, I’ve been stuck at the "OK Plateau"—hitting roughly 80 WPM with inconsistent rhythm and diminishing returns. I realized that my muscle memory was locking in bad habits, and every time I tried to speed up, my precision would fall apart.

I looked at the tools available and found they were either built for beginners (games) or were simple speed tests. None of them provided the telemetry I needed to identify specifically where my motor sequences were failing.

So, I built TouchFlow Pro.

I wanted to shift the focus from "practicing" to "debugging."

The Technical Approach:

Fatigue-Aware Analytics: We track keystroke latency variance in real-time. When your rhythm starts to "wobble," it’s a sign of cognitive fatigue or muscle memory failure.
Specialized Nomenclatures: I built dedicated tracks for Technical Code, Medical (ICD-10/11), and Legal lexicons. Why practice with "The quick brown fox" when you can master the language of your field?
Plateau Diagnostics: Identifying the specific bigram bottlenecks (e.g., 'sc', 'gh', 'rt') that cause your speed to dip.

I’d love your feedback:

I’m solo-bootstrapping this and currently building out a VS Code extension to integrate these analytics directly into our IDEs.

What’s the biggest "bottleneck" in your current keyboard workflow?
Have you ever tried to systematically improve your typing speed, or did you just "stop" once you were fast enough to work?

Looking forward to hearing from the community!

Dustin

DEV Community: Dustin Shoemake

Why I built a typing trainer to "debug" my hands (and break the 80 WPM plateau)

The Technical Approach:

I’d love your feedback: