We just took it as a mentorship exercise. Couple of gals in the group were really fast learners and didn't need as much help, so we know some eventual new-hires who sort of know our system and way of doing things. Also, their questions were often very simple but piercing.
In my previous role, we had few Junior Devs - Teens who are just about to go to college get to experience working on a professional project and seeing if they like software development at a big (FAANG) co. We didn't treat them as interns because the expectation was they did not know anything about software development.
As someone who helps teams with security, please don't take dependencies that haven't been reviewed. If you speed is more critical for you, do not expect your software to be secure and __ALWAYS__ have a incident response plan. It should have a way of informing dev teams, management & customers about what happened, what is being done and how soon.
I stopped looking at my keyboard. I was slow initially but ever so slowly became faster. I too would recommend typeracer[1] as a fun way to speed things up.
> Trying to get a sense of what it would be like to live there
The past few times I went for an interview to a new location, I first went to a meetup / group. Asked folks (who have lived and have no stakes in your interview) what they like and don't like. Also, walked few blocks around interview spot in the evening and morning for as long as I could to get a better feel of the area.