I remember that i did not used to make typos but since a particular period that i vaguely rememebr i have noticed that i make more and more of them. It was some kind of switch, not a long period that the transition took place in. I could not pinpoint the reason behind it but my theory is that my speed of typing increased and with it the amount of incidence of hitting the wrong keys. I think it started primarily when my right digits hit faster than my left ones, so letters get switched. It might be neurological or i picked up some trait from some exercises related to reflexes(martial arts), hard to say but all i could recommend is typing slower or trying to write with the style of never taking your hands off the keyboard and typing with all 10 fingers instead of just few, like most of us do. Hard to switch to this style without actual desire to do so, but it is a solution.
I have also switched to mechanical keyboard because i have noticed that i was missing letters despite feeling that i hit the keys. So having more sensitive keyboard helped to mitigate quite a bit of typos. I have the brown tactile switches but i think i would go for the more sensitive red ones in the future to decrease the key travel distance for key press detection.
BTW dyslexia is more about reading rather than writing and it concerns only languages that are not phonetic.
I had a similar co-worker 12 years ago. He was a wonderful person, very positive, always nice to deal with, but he clearly had dyslexia. He would type in passwords wrong in our password manager. And he was in charge of our backups so once it came time to restore a backup you discover that none of the passwords work.
He had a terrible track record, so bad that he was passed over for the annual salary bump, he eventually quit and became a middle manager at another company.
Could you give a few examples? I'd lean towards adjusting tooling if you can.
My spelling is often horrendous and I know it - but almost every dev I know of prefers to copy and paste anything that might be misspelled just because it's easier than taking the risk.
Similarly - how does does this get anywhere near causing a production outage?
I'd be tempted to view this as a blessing in disguise; this person sounds like they'll trip up more often than the rest, but if one individual can cause a production outage with spelling mistakes something's gone awry with your processes elsewhere. You have an opportunity to fix whatever that is now.
A string value in a json config needed to be updated.
On one prod instance, typo while updating the config by hand. Config validation of the software caught it, software stopped with the appropriate error message, a few minutes later we were up and running again.
We introduced work reviews on prod instances (similar to code reviews) after that.
Later, he then wrote a patch script to avoid making that mistake again.
In the json schema definition used in the script, the name of the property had a typo (how it came to be... no clue, copy paste should have taken care of that).
The script was part of a MR, the reviewer missed the typo. We noticed it in staging.
We introduced tests for config editing scripts after that.
And so it went on and on... The problem is not that it happens and we then refine our processes. It is the frequency.
I've worked with a few dyslexic developers over the years.
The answer is to just be vigilant, patient, and double-check their work.
Many IDEs support spellcheckers, so you could bump up the warning level on suspected spelling errors.
I've only rarely seen them cause run-time issues, but I guess that would be more significant in loosely typed languages where they could slip through to runtime errors more easily.
When using Claude Code either as a CLI or VS Code extension, ask him to use /review and /security-review when he prepares his PR. These slash commands are surprisingly effective at catching mistakes, including typos. And they usually rank the severity of the mistakes. I mostly make typos in comments and the /review command always catches them and lists them as trivial but worth fixing.
If it’s JavaScript, you can gradually migrate to TypeScript and have a Git pre-commit hook to compile (with incremental compilation). And standardise on VSCode or a derivative that makes programmatic typos obvious. Many IDEs will also spell check your strings.
This seems the obvious solution, but it might be useful to get a specific example from OP to see whether these typos can be reliably caught be automation, or if human eyes are required.
We run an internal, fullstack platform that developers from other teams use to make their backend systems available to end users.
To standardize design, we created grammar guidelines and fed instructions to an AI review bot. It catches about 90% of them. The rest we manage to find.
Context: severely dyslexic and have a visual stress thing too; both diagnosed, both late in life.
With that out the way. This person, unless completely not self aware, knows they can't spell and are making mistakes.
It's just a fact. Tell them to slow down and double check their work because they're making mistakes. Offer support and point them in the direction of help as appropriate per company guidelines.
But at the end of the day if they're causing issues, they're causing issues and they need to know. It's something they need to adapt to, not you to them.
You cannot engineer your way around this specific person's faults (for want of a better word). You'd have to do the same for the next person who was making mistakes.
TL;DR
Be up front and tell them they are making mistakes and need to improve. Offer support as required.
Smaller code reviews. If you are a reviewer and don't feel you are able to review something (ie. to catch the typos) within a reasonable time period, reject the review and ask for it to be smaller.
Hopefully a bit more diplomatically than that, though.
But, I agree. Encourage him to go over all of his work once or twice more, and use spellchecking tools, before committing or sending out email/slack/whatever.
If he's truly dyslexic, it won't necessarily help all that much, but if he's just really sloppy it most definitely will.
I remember that i did not used to make typos but since a particular period that i vaguely rememebr i have noticed that i make more and more of them. It was some kind of switch, not a long period that the transition took place in. I could not pinpoint the reason behind it but my theory is that my speed of typing increased and with it the amount of incidence of hitting the wrong keys. I think it started primarily when my right digits hit faster than my left ones, so letters get switched. It might be neurological or i picked up some trait from some exercises related to reflexes(martial arts), hard to say but all i could recommend is typing slower or trying to write with the style of never taking your hands off the keyboard and typing with all 10 fingers instead of just few, like most of us do. Hard to switch to this style without actual desire to do so, but it is a solution.
I have also switched to mechanical keyboard because i have noticed that i was missing letters despite feeling that i hit the keys. So having more sensitive keyboard helped to mitigate quite a bit of typos. I have the brown tactile switches but i think i would go for the more sensitive red ones in the future to decrease the key travel distance for key press detection.
BTW dyslexia is more about reading rather than writing and it concerns only languages that are not phonetic.
You don't.
I had a similar co-worker 12 years ago. He was a wonderful person, very positive, always nice to deal with, but he clearly had dyslexia. He would type in passwords wrong in our password manager. And he was in charge of our backups so once it came time to restore a backup you discover that none of the passwords work.
He had a terrible track record, so bad that he was passed over for the annual salary bump, he eventually quit and became a middle manager at another company.
Could you give a few examples? I'd lean towards adjusting tooling if you can.
My spelling is often horrendous and I know it - but almost every dev I know of prefers to copy and paste anything that might be misspelled just because it's easier than taking the risk.
Similarly - how does does this get anywhere near causing a production outage?
I'd be tempted to view this as a blessing in disguise; this person sounds like they'll trip up more often than the rest, but if one individual can cause a production outage with spelling mistakes something's gone awry with your processes elsewhere. You have an opportunity to fix whatever that is now.
Example:
A string value in a json config needed to be updated.
On one prod instance, typo while updating the config by hand. Config validation of the software caught it, software stopped with the appropriate error message, a few minutes later we were up and running again.
We introduced work reviews on prod instances (similar to code reviews) after that.
Later, he then wrote a patch script to avoid making that mistake again.
In the json schema definition used in the script, the name of the property had a typo (how it came to be... no clue, copy paste should have taken care of that).
The script was part of a MR, the reviewer missed the typo. We noticed it in staging.
We introduced tests for config editing scripts after that.
And so it went on and on... The problem is not that it happens and we then refine our processes. It is the frequency.
I've worked with a few dyslexic developers over the years.
The answer is to just be vigilant, patient, and double-check their work.
Many IDEs support spellcheckers, so you could bump up the warning level on suspected spelling errors.
I've only rarely seen them cause run-time issues, but I guess that would be more significant in loosely typed languages where they could slip through to runtime errors more easily.
Since you haven’t mentioned it, have you heard of blameless post-mortems? They’re a systematic approach to this type of issue.
We had that culture in the team until recently, if not that structured.
The mentioned problems took an emotional toll, I suspect.
Maybe we should formalize the process around this.
Thanks for your insight!
Most editors have some kind of spelling mistake linting extension, that should help!
We do use those, I clarified.
When using Claude Code either as a CLI or VS Code extension, ask him to use /review and /security-review when he prepares his PR. These slash commands are surprisingly effective at catching mistakes, including typos. And they usually rank the severity of the mistakes. I mostly make typos in comments and the /review command always catches them and lists them as trivial but worth fixing.
> less dynamically-typed scripting etc.
What dynamically typed scripting is involved?
If it’s JavaScript, you can gradually migrate to TypeScript and have a Git pre-commit hook to compile (with incremental compilation). And standardise on VSCode or a derivative that makes programmatic typos obvious. Many IDEs will also spell check your strings.
Can you get better tools to catch his mistakes earlier?
This seems the obvious solution, but it might be useful to get a specific example from OP to see whether these typos can be reliably caught be automation, or if human eyes are required.
We run an internal, fullstack platform that developers from other teams use to make their backend systems available to end users.
To standardize design, we created grammar guidelines and fed instructions to an AI review bot. It catches about 90% of them. The rest we manage to find.
Interesting, thanks!!
> code reviews... production outages
> test suite... production outages
Have a staging or integration environment to verify changes.
We have a staging environment. I will clarify.
Context: severely dyslexic and have a visual stress thing too; both diagnosed, both late in life.
With that out the way. This person, unless completely not self aware, knows they can't spell and are making mistakes.
It's just a fact. Tell them to slow down and double check their work because they're making mistakes. Offer support and point them in the direction of help as appropriate per company guidelines.
But at the end of the day if they're causing issues, they're causing issues and they need to know. It's something they need to adapt to, not you to them.
You cannot engineer your way around this specific person's faults (for want of a better word). You'd have to do the same for the next person who was making mistakes.
TL;DR
Be up front and tell them they are making mistakes and need to improve. Offer support as required.
Thanks for your insight. I guess his reaction deterred me from pressing the issue but that there may be no way around it.
Install a spellcheck precommit and call it a day.
Smaller code reviews. If you are a reviewer and don't feel you are able to review something (ie. to catch the typos) within a reasonable time period, reject the review and ask for it to be smaller.
tell them to proof read!
Hopefully a bit more diplomatically than that, though.
But, I agree. Encourage him to go over all of his work once or twice more, and use spellchecking tools, before committing or sending out email/slack/whatever.
If he's truly dyslexic, it won't necessarily help all that much, but if he's just really sloppy it most definitely will.