Jumping Into Steno

I just wanted to link to two really nice blog posts by OSP community member Jladd: Jumping Into Steno Part One and Part Two. I always love personal accounts of how people discover steno and what they're finding as they explore the system, and I really like the way Jladd puts things:

I got back to my hotel room with the nagging feeling that there must be a better way of capturing information in real-time. Away I went to the trusty internet to find the answer I knew had to be out there.

This is exactly how I found out about steno too! I was doing freelance transcription and I knew there had to be a better way. A quick trip to Wikipedia's article on stenotype, and the rest was history.

I had seen this before; I remembered watching Matlock, the detective, on television, presenting his case in the courtroom, and seeing the court reporter sitting up by the judge, quietly doing the impossible…capturing every single word in real-time. I remember puzzling about this when I was young and earnestly concluding that it must be impossible. (After all, they were hardly typing, and the machine they were using seemed to be missing an awful lot of keys.)

I was lucky enough to get to meet Jladd at PyCon 2019, as he notes in the second post, and I'm so happy that those few minutes of us chatting together have led him to give steno a try; he's been a valued contributor to the Plover Discord for just a few months shy of a year now, and we're very lucky to have him. I hope he continues this series! If you'd like to write down your own narrative of how you found out about steno or Plover and how you're finding the experience of learning it, please let me know! I'd like to link to as many of them as possible.