My keyboard obsession definitely turned into a rabbit hole. Once I got into the kinesis split, I immediately realized the world of wanting to customize it. This led me to figuring out soldering/desoldering, and over the past year figuring out how to do a DIY build.
I'm pretty busy, but I've tried to find 2/3 hours a month to progress on it, and keyboards feel like the type of "investment in my craft" that is worth that kind of time for me.
You hit the nail on the head with the 2/3 thumb key bit. That is what was such a game changer for me with the kinesis. all the sudden you have real estate to take a layering approach that you just can't with normal keyboards.
Smart but unproductive is a class. We've all had experiences with those types of engineers. I think startups generally weed them out though. It's hard to survive at a startup without being productive. I probably should have put that as a disclaimer up front.
What started as a joke a few years ago has actually turned into really good signal. I've found that the engineers who care enough to invest in keyboards like this spend a lot of time investing in their tooling and are extremely productive.
We decided to open-source Nuon after almost 4 years of operating as a closed-source company. As BYOC has become a more standard way to deploy software, we realized that critical infrastructure like we're building belonged to the community.
Our hope is that by building in the open, we can help create standards for BYOC deployments. Some of the hardest challenges we've found are around security, day-2 operations and supporting different customer environments.
I will also add, part of the reason I'm most bullish on amp at this point is because their architecture allows interacting with amp from different contexts + threading is better than anything else I've seen so far.
I've been thinking more and more how modern coding agents are best when you can use them natively in your editor.
You as a developer have more context and in turn can give your agent more context. I think seeing developers not using editors anymore is going to turn out to be an antipattern.
I've been updating amp.nvim to let me drive it without ever leaving nvim and it's really good.
I wrote some thoughts on Bring Your Own Bucket, the evolution of S3 and why I think that blob storage is the default storage layer for any software deployed into customer environments.
We were using podman at our company, and it was great for a while but we recently migrated to orb.
The UX with orb is just much easier and the small gotchas between docker/podman started to add up. Especially with buildkit issues we had run into and things like using a remote buildkit instance (which we now use), was not supported well enough.
we wrote about how fx + fxtest has helped us do integration tests in a fairly large code base (200+ api endpoints, ~500k loc) with a small team