I am a software developer(to be precise, a web developer). There are times when I have to input some text into a field to test the system. I talking about wether-it-works-or-not testing, not the QA department’s testing. The problem is, I find this to be a lot of work.

Let me draw a little scenario for you. Say I am working on a registration form. I create the necessary fields, say name and email. I create the backend to save the data to the database. Now I must check to see if the system works. So I enter my name into the name field and hit submit. Then I fire up phpMyAdmin and see if the value appears in the Database. If it does, all is fine with the world. If the data did not appear, I swear for some time and try to find out where the bug is.

The problem

Let me bring to your attention one sentence from the above paragraph…

So I enter my name into the name field and hit submit.

I am going to break up that sentence for you. A nice little algorithm to do this job. Before that, let me warn you that have to know typing to know what I mean.

My current position is like this…

Left hand on the keyboard, index finger touching the ‘F’ key and right hand on the mouse.

• Step 1 : Raise the right hand from the mouse
• Step 2 : Place the right hand on the keyboard.
• Step 3 : Find the ‘J’ key
• Step 4 : Type out ‘Binny’ using both hands.
• Step 5 : Raise the right hand from the keyboard
• Step 6 : Place it on the mouse.
• Step 7 : Click Submit.

And we are done. Like I said, too much work. (Well, if you are as lazy as me, you would find that a lot of work too.)

The Solution

So I did some work on the problem – I tried to ‘optimize’ this algorithm. This is what I came up with…

Step 1 : Type out ‘asdf’ using the left hand
Step 2 : Click Submit.

Wow! A 350% improvement. I patted myself on the back and used this method for a while. But after some time, this gets boring. All you form fields have the value ‘asdf’ or ‘safd’ or ‘afds’ or some other variations of these four characters. As a result, the imaginative part of my brain started to complain. So I started to create some variations in this routine. I began to use valid words like…

• sad
• fad
• daff

Then I had a epiphany – I don’t have to limit myself to the middle row – I could use the other two rows also. Before long, I was creating words like…

• raw
• fast
• safe
• cats
• water
• after
• create
• wasted

Later, I began to create entire sentences using just the left hand.

• Rats eat waste.
• As wasted as a dead cat.
• Create waste water.

Beautiful, ain’t it?

The Challenge

Now this is the challenge. Find the largest word and the largest sentence that can be created using just the left hand. Ie. the largest word and sentence that uses just the letters…

abcdefgqrstvwxz

Best of luck. Use the comment area to report your answers.