I taught myself to notice how bad my typing was, then spent a summer fixing it (and building a tool to help)
For most of my life I typed fine. Fast enough, good enough, nobody noticed. Then I started a physics degree where every lab report, every problem set, every late-night email to a professor ran through a keyboard, and “fine” started costing me time I didn’t have.
So I did the thing every typing article tells you to do and went back to basics — home row, proper finger placement, the whole humbling process of typing worse before typing better. What I noticed is that almost every typing tool I tried measured the wrong thing. They’d show me a words-per-minute number that went up even on days I made a mess of every third word, because they were counting raw keystrokes, not net accuracy. That’s not a measurement of skill. That’s a measurement of how fast you can mash a keyboard.
I ended up building my own tool this summer — WorkThoseKeys (workthosekeys.com), which started life as TypeCast and briefly went by Typefast before I settled on this name. It tracks net WPM, which actually penalizes errors, and it goes one step further than most tools I tried: it tracks which specific letter pairs trip you up, not just which letters, and builds practice around that.
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It also has an AI coach that translates all that error data into actual advice — plain sentences about what to work on, instead of a table of percentages you have to interpret yourself.
The part I didn’t expect to love: book mode. Instead of generic practice text, you can type your way through real public-domain literature — short poems if you want something you can finish on a coffee break, or the entirety of Moby-Dick if you want a project that’ll take you months. Your position saves between sessions either way.
I’m not a professional developer — I’m a physics student who also teaches sailing — so I built this using an AI-assisted app builder rather than writing everything by hand. That’s a separate story. The short version of this one is: if your typing tool is telling you a speed you’re proud of, it might just be lying to you a little. And it’s free, with a guest mode if you’d rather not sign in at all.
Try it at: workthosekeys.com
