Projects

Learn touch typing using custom reading materials with Typr

tl;dr Typr is a simple web-based typing tutor that lets you practice typing using your own material. It also provides live feedback on typing speed, and in the future will include detailed statistics and algorithmically-generated custom exercises. Create an account and use it for free here. Check out some screencasts of the UI. Check out the source code on Github. The demo is currently hosted on a Heroku free-tier server which treats itself to a nap when there is no traffic and can take up to 30 seconds to wake up, so please be patient!

Learning to type at 100 WPM in two weeks

tl;dr It’s hard to underestimate the importance of typing. Unless you are a journalist, legal secretary, or professional writer, you probably don’t get enough practice to ever become truly fast. I built Typr and used it to simultaneously read & type “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. Two weeks and 100,195 words later, I was maintaining between 100-110 WPM after starting out at 50 WPM. If you like reading, kill two birds with one stone by using Typr to practice typing material you would otherwise be reading.

Build and manage Selenium web scrapers with Auto-Scrape

tldr: Auto-scrape let’s you focus on writing web scraping scripts, while it takes care of logging, data persistance, data presentation and data export, all through a modern browser-based UI. It can be run locally or deployed remotely. Here are some screencasts of the UI. Get it on Github. Why scrape the web? Building a Selenium web scraper is almost a rite of passage for programmers starting out. Watching a computer fill out forms, click links and collect data before your eyes is not only a highly satisfying and suitably non-abstract exercise for beginners to complete - browser automation forms a foundation for frontend testing, can be used for automated research, and of course can be used to replace those expensive and unreliable humans to accomplish a wide range of business-related tasks.