The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Building customizable ergonomic keyboards (Interview)

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Erez Zukerman shares the story of launching the ErgoDox EZ on Indiegogo (May 2015), what it takes to create customizable ergonomic keyboards, the benefits of split keyboards and custom key layouts, repairability and longevity, community engagement, and the attention to detail required in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and keyboard...we cover it all.

What's up, friends? This is The Change Law. We feature the hackers, the leaders, and those who are creating open source ergonomic keyboards. Yes, today we're joined by Erez Zuckerman, one of the fine folks behind Ergodox EZ that kickstarted this whole thing off. Erez shares his journey of creating customizable keyboards, creating ZSA, the company behind it all, the benefits of split keyboards, customizable key layouts, repairability and longevity,

the right to repair, community engagement, his attention to detail in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and keyboard. We cover it all. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com.

Fly is a public cloud built for developers who ship. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly, and you can too. Deploy your app in five minutes at fly.io. Okay, let's ErgoDox. platform because, hey, we use Sentry and we love Sentry. And I know tracing is one of the next big frontiers for Sentry. Why add tracing to the platform? Why tracing and why now? When we first launched the ability to collect tracing data, we were really emphasizing the performance aspect of that, the kind of application performance monitoring aspect, you know, because you have these things that are spans that measure how long something takes. And so the natural thing is to

try to graph their durations and think about their durations and, you know, warn somebody if the durations are getting too long. But what we've realized is fix the problem, not just sort of giving you more gauges. A lot of what we're trying to do now is focus a little bit less on the sort of just the performance monitoring side of things and turn tracing into a tool that actually aids the debuggability of problems. I love it. Okay, so they mean it when they say code breaks, fix it faster with Sentry. More than 100,000 growing teams use Sentry to find problems fast, and you can too. Learn more at Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. And use our code CHANGELOG.

Get $100 off the team plan. That's almost four months free for you to try out Sentry. Once again, Sentry.io. So we're here with Aris Zuckerman, who makes an amazing family of ergonomic keyboards. Welcome to the show, Aris. Thank you. Happy to be here. I guess we should start with ergonomics in the first place because Adam and I are both admiring the keyboards you all make and they're so cool. And we'll get into all the details of these things. And Adam says to me, I wish they just made a regular keyboard. And I said, well, he'll probably sell you on the benefits of ergonomic keyboards. So I figure that's probably where your story starts is ergonomics or how did

you get into this in the first place? Sure. Yeah, no, that's, that's, those are really two questions, I guess, somewhat related. So yeah, I'm a procrastinator. Welcome to the club. Yeah. If you give me a task, you know, I, I will spend an obscene amount of time trying to figure out, okay, what is the best way to do this? Like it would have taken me an hour, but no, I will spend the 10 hours. Like what is, what's like the best? And years ago I was a writer. I used to write for PC world. I used to write and edit

for make use of, which was another tech blog. And that's a lot of typing. It's a lot of writing. And that kind of got me into a rabbit hole of how can I do this better this feels weird even before that my very first ergonomic keyboard my very first keyboard was an ergonomic keyboard it was the Microsoft uh natural 4000 way back when so I kind of had it in the back of my mind that it can be better like I don't have to use a laptop keyboard I don't have to use like a crappy you know mushy keyboard and then basically I switched to a better keyboard layout so I was still using the same hardware but the keys were arranged differently that's a layout called colmac and if you're listening to this and you're feeling uncomfortable typing that would be the first thing I would suggest. Don't even buy anything.

Just switch to a better keyboard layout with a keyboard you already have. And Colmac was interesting because there's like this graduated system of learning it. I was getting paid by the word. I was writing for a living. So it was kind of scary to switch to a different keyboard layout

because at the time, this was years and years ago, there wasn't really great dictation software or anything like that. So if I can't type, I can't write, I can't pay the bills. So I transitioned over to Colmac using this graduated system called Tarmac, where first you change like three keys and I kind of lived with those. It's like QWERTY, but three keys are in like the wrong places okay so i lived like that for a month got over that changed a few more keys a few more keys and ever since then i've been typing like this with colmac so that was kind of not the start but step two but it didn't stop there obviously i i was comfortable using colmac rabbit holes deep yeah i was I was comfortable using CoolMac. Rabbit hole is deep.

Yeah, I was comfortable using CoolMac, but I was like, man, I'm sure there's better stuff out there. So I got this wonderful keyboard that's made to this day. This was the Kinesis Advantage. And that's a keyboard that's like one massive thing, and your hands are slightly separated, and there's these bowls, these key bowls that your fingers sink into it's very very cool and i got it blank you could you could get it with no nothing on the keycaps because by that time the keycaps would have been wrong for me so i got it with nothing and um my wife loved that because i was relearning to type yet again and like completely but within a couple weeks i was able to type pretty, pretty well on this blank keyboard.

And then I loved the hardware. It was lovely for me, but I wanted it to do more. I was like, man, like, why does one key do only one thing? Right. I mean, what if I hold it down? What if I tap it twice? What if, you know, all those things. And then I kind of got into the possibilities of what's possible,

like what's out there in terms of smarter keyboards. And I found the Ergodox. And this was an open source design by Dominique Poucham, a Quebecois. And at the time, you could buy it as a box of parts from Massdrop before they were called drop.com. You would pay hundreds of dollars and wait a couple months and get a box of parts, including surface mount diodes, which are these teeny tiny grain of rice things

you have to put on a circuit board at exactly the right place and the right orientation and solder down again and again, because there's many of these. I looked at it and I said, you know what? I'm probably not the only one who wants a keyboard like that, but isn't going to go through the trouble of, you know, assembling it myself. So that's where my partner, Dima, my business partner comes in. He's the managing director of Tebow, which is a Taiwanese company I used to work at. I did a whole bunch of stuff before. So I used to work with Tebow. They make really nice industrial gear, very high-end manufacturing. So I contacted him. This was a few years after I was done working

there. I contacted him. I said, hey, Dima, listen, I think I got something here. Maybe let's make a keyboard. Look at this design. design we can make it right we nobody can take out the trademark we don't own the trademark ergodox nobody can but i told him it's not about the trademark let's do it do it well and you know he kind of thought it over and he found one on ebay somebody was selling an assembled one so he bid on on the one on ebay and got outbid at 400 us at the time yeah this was nine years ago factoring inflation yeah two thousand dollars yeah exactly yeah then he emailed me back and said okay no you know what there is something here but we need money to get off the ground so here comes crowdfunding and uh we did a crowdfunding campaign, our first and so far our last.

I'm in no rush to do that again. It was March when we launched the campaign. And I was telling people, we're going to ship in December. Back us now, we're shipping this keyboard in December. And we did. We ran the campaign for two months. We raised 80,000 US, which was what we needed. And in December, the first Ergodoxys were being shipped to customers,

which is really the accomplishment here for me, right? Because crowdfunding campaigns for hardware are notoriously late. Yeah. And it's a position of trust. People were really trusting me to deliver on this thing i was unknown who is this guy even he doesn't say why they trust you yeah i don't know i mean maybe maybe i came across his trust within the video who knows but it was actually funny there was a whole a whole thing around the crowdfunding because some people initially thought

it was a scam actually some people thought oh thought, oh, these people are just, who are they even? Because the keyboard world is very much a community. It's tight knit. And I was not of that community. I'm not really a social media type of person. And I don't like hang out on forums and stuff. It's not something I enjoy so much. So nobody knew who I was. So in fact,

some people at the very beginning thought, oh, these guys are scammers. They're trying to like cheat people out of their money. They're never going to ship this. Who is this guy even? So we actually had to revet at some point with Indiegogo and tell them, no, no, here's Tebow Technology. This is the company that's going to make this. This is a real manufacturer in Taiwan, all lined up. And they were like, okay, fine. And then yes, we did ship, but it was definitely, it was definitely a leap of faith for the people who backed us and we rose up to it. And I think, yeah, I was happy and the people who got the keyboard were happy. So this was nine years ago. Is that right?

2015. Wow. It was a different time than I think. It was very popular. It still is popular, but I'm not sure how very popular it is. Crowdfunding or keyboards? Crowdfunding was very popular a decade ago, basically. Even more so. Kickstarter was a big thing.

Trendy. That was the place to launch a new, innovative thing. And I think if you're going to break the mold on keyboards and do all the assembly, all the hard parts of, I mean, it's already hard to change your keyboard layout, right? It's already hard to even change your keyboard, let alone have to learn how to assemble and build it to do the change. You know what I mean? Like you're cutting out a lot of things in that process. Oh, yeah. No, for sure. Having something that comes nice out of the box, you just simply take it out of the box,

you plug it in and it works. And something, there's also the whole configuration aspect of it that really has to do with what is ergonomics, right? So it always gets me when I see ergonomic keyboards that work one way. So I know it's probably ergonomic or comfortable for hopefully the person who designed it. I guess it works for them. But maybe my hands are a different size or maybe some of my fingers are more or less nimble than others. So there's the whole question of once you plug the keyboard in, can you customize it?

Can you adapt it so that it works for you? And before with these keyboards, well, and with some of these keyboards to this day, you go to the source code. There is a beautiful piece of code called QMK, stands for quantum mechanical keyboard. And that's a spinoff of tmk which is an even earlier mechanical keyboard firmware but qmk is very very powerful lets you do many many things with your keyboard you can have layers you can have one key that you can tap and hold or tap tap or like a whole bunch of or like a combo where you mash six keys at the same time and you get something on your screen all sorts of stuff but my password matching certain keys for a length of time it's like exactly don't need to actually type something

in or you know it can actually bypass the biometric because if you've got this crazy keyboard anyways i'm thinking like mission impossible right when they break into the person's all the way yeah they get they get into the henchman's layer and they go and they access the keyboard and it's like, I can't even operate this thing because it's this tarmac thing or this Colmac thing. We were just, we were talking to a user in New York the other

day and he was showing his keyboard and he got all blanks and he says, yeah, when I ordered from you, it was all printed keycaps, but that was too friendly to people who weren't me. So I swapped out the keycaps for blanks and now like nobody can use it. Yeah, nothing only.

There you go. So you plug in the keyboard and you want to change how it works. So in the past and in some keywords, some other keywords now, you kind of go to the code. You need to know a little bit of C and be comfortable compiling stuff locally

and building and, you know, installing the make toolchain and all that and I felt there was value in having a graphical configurator a way that I can like click stuff on my screen and see the keyboard and just like change things in a browser hit compile and all that is done for me and then I just get a binary file it goes on to the keyboard and all the smarts still me. And then I just get a binary file. It goes onto the keyboard and all the smarts still live on the keyboard, but I didn't have to write all the code. Well, that's very smart.

That's kind of, yeah, it's fun. It allows people to iterate and allows people to truly like adapt the keyboard to what they need. Because if it's a high friction process, if it's really hard to change the keyboard to do what you need it to do, you're just gonna stick with that as it's coming out of the box and you're missing out.

So the game is to make it easy for people to adapt it to what they want to do. So you take it out of the box, you plug it in, you go to an app in the browser, which by the way is freely available. You can play with the app before you buy. It's right there. You don't even need an account or anything. So you kind of get a sense for what it can do. You play around with this app, modify, compile, flash it onto the keyboard. All of this happens in the browser. And then you type. And then you realize, oh man, this isn't working for me. This key is

uncomfortable. It's too much of a reach for my pinky. So you go in and you move that key, right? You just, for example, my, I don't like reaching for the space key. It's for the shift key. I'm sorry. I don't like reaching for the shift key. So my shift key is the same key as my space bar on my Voyager. So when I hit it, it gives me a a space but if I want to capitalize the letter I just hold down on the same key and it becomes a shift nice so and that's under my thumb that's why I'm doing the thing if you're watching the video and that's that's my left thumb so that level of adaptability makes a difference let me ask you a question if that's the way you do it right you've got this modified way maybe even it's muscle

memory because you do it daily sure and we're hanging out at a conference and i'm like okay there is a hop on my machine real quick and do something are you do you have to like unwire your brain to transpose back to a normal keyboard no that's that's the fun well yes and no i'm gonna go with no for the shape because as long as you are running cold mac as long as like your letter keys are where my brain expects them i'm good right i have i have a macbook i use the macbook itself often just like on the sofa or when i travel or Well, when I travel, it's with a keyboard. But I use the MacBook itself often. It's just as fast. Because the shape is so, so different.

Like, when I'm using one of our keyboards, like, I'm literally like this. Like, my chest is open. My shoulders are out. And it's one. The posture is different. Everything feels different. So, it's like using two totally different instruments. So, I'm just as fast right

i can see that because your uh your arm placement sort of suggests to your brain hey this is a new scenario so scenario a is my way scenario b is you know maybe the b size where you're going back to a normal way and your configuration is different in terms of not the keyboard but the way your body orients itself to the device. Another word for it is maybe like a modality, like it's an input modality, right? So there's no confusion then. Like, I think if we were to make a normal looking keyboard,

yeah, that would probably be a problem. But because the shape is so weird and different, it's just not a non-issue. So for our listeners sake who hasn't seen these we should say if it's not totally clear these are split keyboards so there's two halves to these keyboards i think probably people have inferred that by now but oh yeah so there's two halves there's a cable in between it's not wireless we can go into that by the way that's a whole thing our keywords are not wireless and will not be wireless for the foreseeable future but there's cables there's a cable separating both halves

and uh and then it goes to the computer from the left side yeah good point to clarify jared yeah they're they're separated when we say normal keyboard it's a contiguous keyboard that's all connected not separated like you would normally use right but you said it's it's weird and different and yet we're saying the word normal. At least I am. I think you are too, Jared. A keyboard? I don't want to assume.

Well, I mean, a laptop keyboard would be normal. Mine are definitely weird. I mean, unabashedly so. They're just, you know, strange-looking keyboards. Yes, that is what we make. Okay, you were saying the opposite. You were saying the Voyager, this style is weird and different. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. I thought you were saying the normal keyboards are wearing different i'm like that doesn't compute no no the the normal keyboards are you know what normal like basically close your eyes and draw a keyboard out of memory that's normal that's what a keyboard looks like well i have gone a little bit into this world i think maybe i use that same microsoft keyboard that you had where it was an ergonomic keyboard and it was split but they were immovable. It was still one big piece of keyboard.

It had the beautiful swooping curve. It was very nicely done. It was a beautiful keyboard. Yeah, and it was comfortable. And I was using it specifically for a reason, which is probably why a lot of people reach for these is because they have hand pain from using traditional keyboards. I had pain on the outside of my left hand,

my pinky finger. That was getting worse and worse. And of course, as a keyboard typist daily, I'm starting to worry like if I plot my trajectory of pain, you know, from now, I think I was in my late twenties at the time into the future, this is going to become unsustainable. And of course I've seen people with the surgeries and with the straps on and stuff. And I'm like, I don't want that to happen to me. And so I got the Microsoft one, used it for maybe a year or two. And then I realized that by remapping, actually, all of my pain was sourced from a single motion,

which was fixed by remapping my caps lock to control. That's amazing. Yeah, just the one key change that I still use to this day on a regular MacBook just took that problem completely away. It took me a long time to land on that. And there's pain in the interim, but when I realized, and now I'm also stealing our listeners' ability

to understand because I'm showing you with my hand as I just did this over and over again, which I'm tweaking to the left to hit control. I was getting to that control spot. Emax spin key type of thing. Yeah, exactly. And so if I just moved that to caps lock, I never had to move there again, and the problem went away.

So I understand 100% the power of just being able to change a few keyboards around and completely change your life in a small enough way that matters. Totally. It always gets me. We actually hear from people writing now and then saying like, you know, this keyboard saved my career. I can, because coders work long hours.

I mean, it's a cliche, but it's also true. And then they, you know, and then they're done work and they're still at the keyboard because like their hobbies involve the keyboard. So yeah, it's always fun when somebody says this was life-changing what was the name of the microsoft keyboard again i may have gapped that i want to make sure we stamp it again it was the microsoft natural 4000 okay that's one you use jared use that one uh let me look it up real quick and see at least a version of it because they still sell one today and i was looking it up and I'm like, is this still?

No, the 4000 is like super duper old. That's long gone. Not that we're trying to advertise this necessarily, but the latest, if this is true, it seems to be called Microsoft Sculp. Yep. Ergonomic keyboard. So is this like the latest version of that to your knowledge, like based on your usage? Exactly. Okay.

Yeah, that's like that. Yes. yes microsoft scope is the one i used so comparative to this one the scope doesn't have what you have which is this ability to completely separate why is the ability to completely separate the two halves an important factor two main reasons posture and movement posture first of all is let's say i were to separate the parts and leave them in one place. Just stretch and weigh out and leave them in one place. Actually, I'm going to go with posture, movement, and mobility. I'll get to that. But posture, if I were to separate the two parts and just leave them fixed in their new positions,

I already open up my chest. I drop my shoulders, the whole neck area. People get stress and tension headaches because of this has to do with like the monitor placement, but also the keyword placement and the interaction between the shoulders and the neck opens up. And then once you open up, that also has implication for breath. It's actually easier to breathe. And that has a whole host of other like health repercussions, or I guess benefits if you can to take the positive here, if you if your breath is working many things in your body work, right? So just open up, calm down. And it reduces stress across many parts of your body, not just your hands.

That's one benefit of split. But the other benefit is being, well, and I guess actually to go more in position, another side benefit there is that you can tent them. You can control the angle relative to the desk and actually make a little roof and kind of, and it doesn't have to be the same angle on each half, right? So one can be like really severely angled to an almost handshake position. The other one much flatter. That's fine. The keyboard can do that. That's not a problem because it's split. It's totally independent halves, right? And then you can also rotate them as whatever works for you. You can have them rotated. So you're coming in from the side like this,

or you can have them rotated outwards. And again, you can change each of them independently. But that brings me to movement, which is the second one. You can actually, you can, I'm going to say you should make those changes throughout the day. Move around.

Like one thing that really gets me is those ergonomic posters and infographics that show you like the right typing posture. And you have this like robot looking person that's all right angles and the head is exactly straight and the forearms are exactly straight and the knees and like, okay, like that, that's one way to do it, sure, for five, 10 minutes. But really what we are meant to do as humans is move. We are meant to shift our position throughout the day. And I definitely think you should take movement breaks when you work. You should stand up.

You should sit down. I have this very cool little thing here called the MoveMate, actually. That's like this wobbly platform that you can stand and kind of play around on. But a part of that is being able to just shift your keyboard around, draw it in closer, push it far, all that. And that also has other advantages, of course, you know, less movement based, but let's say you're gaming. So no problem. You just unplug the right half entirely, chuck it out, lots of room for your mouse. And the left half can now be this super powered macro pad just for your game if you're like

an MMO type of guy. So that's the second one. And then the third one, third good reason for a split it packs down it's really easy you know you when you type it's a full-size like spacious keyboard because you have all this room to spread out but when it's time to take it somewhere there is an included carrying case which is small because it's like a sandwich it's basically the footprint of one half so you're just gonna smoosh it together. Stack them.

Stack them, yeah. They're separated with layers of fabric there, and it's a soft case on purpose, so you can kind of squish it in as you need to. Take it and go. Small. This probably doesn't work for hunters and peckers, people who touch type, right?

Who can't touch type, people who are looking down and poking across the board you know less skilled typists perhaps or no no problem no not not more sometimes less of a problem than skill typists because when you are a skill typist you have some unlearning to do it's jarring like i i often say you know know, like the immediate effect of putting one of our keyboards on your desk, it's basically like you got a brain injury because a moment ago you could type just fine. Now you got this thing you have no idea how to type.

You lost the ability to type, right? And that's something you need to take into account. Like there is definitely a learning curve. You got to know this if you're getting one of these keyboards. And if you are used to 100, 120 words per minute, it's going to take you. Slow you down. Yeah, it's going to slow you down. It's going to slow you down for a while.

It takes people three weeks to recover, to go back up and sometimes beyond their previous speed. But it's going to take you time. Versus if you are a hunt and peck type of user, you don't have that unlearning. You can just start from, you know, from getting faster. Right. The learning curve you will have there or you may have there depends more on your background.

If you are a non-technical user, we do have non-technical users. We have all sorts of lawyers and teachers and many people who are not necessarily programmers. Obviously, if you're a lawyer, it doesn't mean you're non-technical, but I'm saying people who are not coders. So there is sometimes a learning curve, not so much around the physical act of typing, but more around getting your head around. Wow. Like, what can I do with this thing? Like all of the options, it's, it's so wide using and it split enough that i did have a little bit of a slowdown i remember realizing that my left index finger was doing too much work it had been reaching across the keyboard to some to the right side to do stuff and i couldn't do that anymore because they were split yeah and so it actually kind of fixed my form in that way i was like this finger shouldn't be doing that much work. It should be staying over here on its side. And so, yeah, there are certainly things that you would learn along the way. I want to go back to what you mentioned

about, unless Adam, on the split stuff, do you have more or can we move back to the wires? Just one thing I want to mention on the split, and it's not necessarily the split, it's the ability to try without having to buy. I found this on your site it's a full-size printout yep of the ergodox ex and so that way you could just print it off and put on your desk and at least get a feel for it and you can cut the paper and fake it essentially and just kind of get a feel for it with just a print you know print the paper. That's it. Yeah, exactly.

We have one of these for each of our keyboards and you just print it out at 100%. It even comes with a little ruler so you can put a real ruler next to it and verify you got it right. Yeah. And then, yeah, you just place it down and figure out, okay, where is this going to go in my space?

Does this even feel good hey friends i'm here with brandon foo co-founder and ceo of paragon paragon lets b2b sass companies ship native integrations to production in days with more than 130 pre-built connectors or configure own custom integrations so brandon days with more than 130 pre-built connectors or configure own custom integrations. So Brandon, talk to me about the friction developers feel with integrations, SSO, dealing with rate limits, retries, auth, all the things. Yeah, so there's a lot here and I think there's a lot of aspects to the different problems that you have to solve in the integration story, in building these integrations and also providing them in a user-friendly way for your customers to self-serve

and onboard and consume those integrations. So part of what the Paragon SDK provides is that embedded user experience, again, what we call our connect portal. That's going to provide the authentication for your users to connect their accounts. That's going to be the initial onboarding. But in addition to that, your users may also want to configure different options or settings for their integrations. A common example that we see for Salesforce or for CRM integrations in general is that your users may want to select some type of custom object mapping. Every CRM can be configured differently. So your users might want to map objects to some different type of record in their Salesforce or different fields in their Salesforce.

And typically, that's what developers would have to build on their own is this UI for your users to configure these different settings for every single integration. just that initial onboarding and authentication experience, but also the configuration end user UX for different settings like custom field mapping, selecting which types of features on your integration that your user might want to configure. And that's also going to be provided fully out of the box by Paragon SDK. Okay, cool. That's the front of the house. That's the UI layer that developers are getting. So what about the backend, the re-limiting, the retries, etc? With integrations, different APIs might have different rate limits. They might have different policies that you have to conform with. And your developers typically have to learn these different nuances for every API and write code individually to conform to those different nuances. With Paragon, because we build

and maintain the connector with each of the integrations that we support in our catalog, we're automatically going to handle for things like retries, things like rate limits. For example, Paragon knows the rate limit for each provider and will automatically throttle your requests so that you can conform to the rate limit for those providers and be able to intelligently retry requests in the events that you exceed the rate limit or a request fails. And so we look at this as sort of the backend or infrastructure layer of the integration problem that we have spent the last five years essentially building and optimizing the Paragon infrastructure to act as the integration infrastructure for your application.

Okay. Paragon is built for product management. It's built for engineering. It's built for everybody. Ship hundreds of native integrations into your SaaS application in days or build your custom connector with any API. Learn more at useparagon.com slash changelog. Again, useparagon.com slash changelog. That's U-S-E-P-A-R-A-G-O-N dot com slash changelog. I'm down with wires, Jared. Talk about wires, man. Well, Eric's down with wires, and he's out with wireless. I mean, I think you're going to say latency, but I'm wondering what your...

You made a strong stance on wires. We use wires, and I think you said we're always going to use wires for the foreseeable future you know for as long as you know nothing in the pipeline wireless okay yeah i have many uh feelings about wireless stuff i have many emotions it's not actually latency i don't think that's the thing for us because we are not particularly low latency. I mean, we're not targeting that. We're not for gamers. For me, I really want to make a keyboard that people can use in 15, 20, 25 years to have a reasonable expectation of being able to use this thing. So what does that mean? It means that the parts I use, first of all, it means the hardware design. It's something you should be able to open up, right? You should be

able to open up and poke inside, replace bits and pieces. Of course, as long as I'm in business, I also sell replacement parts, but many of these are non-proprietary. You can just get them anywhere, key switches and whatnot. It's a mechanical keyboard, so it has moving parts. And the number one moving part is, of course, the key switch. So the key switch should be hot swappable. You should be able to just pull it out, like you pull out a tooth and stick a new one in, because that part will break over time.

We were, by the way, one of the first hot swap keyboards in the world. Nowadays, it's kind of a common feature. But if you dig through the Internet Archive, you'll see us as one of the very first to get there. So it's a lot around repairability. Or if you take the firmware, for example, again, QMK. QMK is open source and is not. ZSA sponsors QMK development. We're one of the few companies that actively pay for a developer to work on QMK. But we don't own the code base and we don't control it.

Which means if, let us say, we're ever to go out of business, the firmware is still there. You can totally flash it. Like imagine if Sonos went out of business. You know, I got Sonos speakers. Imagine if Sonos tomorrow packs up and that's it.

Preach. Okay. Like at least their new stuff has bluetooth but i don't have like the bluetooth ones i have like the the ikea thing and a couple others and if someone's were to to call it quits okay now i got paperweights right so repairability goes to the firmware it goes not using glue not using clips that break on people, just using sane and normal screws in shapes that people actually have bits for. And we have teardown guides for each of our keyboards. We show you in detail how to take it apart. Except for the Ergodox EZ, that teardown guide is actually by iFixit, who tore it down and gave it 10 out of 10 on repairability. So what's that and wireless? What's the connection? Why am I going on a big repairability rant when we're talking wireless? Because wireless means batteries. To make a

product wireless, it must obviously include a power source. And those batteries, there is a lot there. First of all, I mean, there's a whole like sustainability aspect of even making them, which I won't go into because, yeah, obviously myself, I have a battery in my laptop. I have a battery in, you know, many gadgets I use. But it does take resources to make them. But more than that, they will die. A battery is basically like a timer for a product. This, to me, is like planned obsolescence to the max.

Sometimes, you know, if it's a laptop or a camera, let's take a camera. A camera, obviously, okay, I need to take the thing outside for it to work. So it needs a battery. Laptop, I got to travel with it. Okay, I accept that. Phone. Some things need a battery. A keyboard is going to literally live on my desk its entire life within like, I don't know, 10 inches of a power source. It does not need a battery. And by putting one in, I'm effectively guaranteeing that in a decade or 15 years, it goes to the landfill. I had the pleasure of talking to Kyle Weins.

I know you know his name because he started iFixit. He came on the show, I want to say at least in the last year. I feel like it was, yeah, March this year. The show is called We Have a Right to Repair! Because that's how I felt after talking to him. March this year. The show is called We Have a Right to Repair! Exclamation point because that's how I felt after talking to him. And he said,

he said this, I'm going to quote something he said in that show. He said, if you buy a thing, and this is concurring with what you're saying, quote,

if you buy a thing with a battery, you're just renting it. Love it. The battery's going to wear out. That's a consumable. So anything with a battery that has a lifespan of 500 to a thousand charge cycles you're just renting it depending on how they configure that battery so he went on to say about the apple airpods which is a very popular wireless and i

like them i love i don't know how you would make them with wires if otherwise that is kind of the feature of the thing. But it's still true that they get about 500, maybe 1,000 charge cycles. How frequently do you charge your AirPods? I don't know, daily, nightly, constantly? Maybe you get a year or so out of them, battery life-wise? You're just renting it, is what he said. That's really, really true.

And that's also an interesting segue, because it's interesting that you mentioned the airpods because uh there's this company the company that makes the fair phone have you heard of the fair phone okay so this is a black and white one no no it's not black and white it's an android device it's basically a mid-range android device just a phone but the thing is they actually make it repairable so the battery that they need to use is user replaceable. The whole thing is repairable. And they recently announced wireless earbuds. And they look kind of like, you know, kind of like the Apple ones, but they have a battery

that you can replace. They actually were able to design the thing so you can open it, take out this tiny battery, pop a new one in, and ta-da, a new lease on life. So if you need a battery, at least make it easy for me to replace. But if you don't absolutely need a battery, if your product is going to just be stationary for the most part and live right next to some sort of power source, such as a computer, like my keyboard requires a computer to do anything, that computer should give it power.

That's a whole bunch of obsolescence we avoid right there. And I have people who backed the original Ergodox CZ back in 2015, got it early 2016 or December or whatever, December 2015 or whatever, and writing into this day saying, yeah, you know, I have a question or this thing, or they're still using it. And the configurator, by the way, still works with it also. That's cool. Yeah. I agree with you. I think that's a really good reason. I think that there are probably contexts and I can think of some in which a wireless keyboard is really a nice thing to have but i understand as

a trade-off perhaps that doesn't make it worth it and i think even in terms of simplicity of manufacturing production probably keeping your prices down as well as a business there's probably some concerns there as well like make these things as simple as possible or is that not a no not a huge concern as a business actually our costs are super high our economics are weird we invest much like much more of the total cost of the keyboard that you pay goes into actually making the thing and i'm fine with that i'm okay because again we make them make the keyboards in taiwan and they're made by people who are employees, not our employees, but people's employees and they're paid well.

And the whole thing is just expensive to make. Like when you do something right, it tends to be expensive. And if I really believed that wireless was the way to go value wise, I would go for it. Even if it made the keyboard more expensive, that's fine. That's not, I don't compete on price. What do your margins look like? If you don't mind us asking like percentage wise. Not amazing, but sustainable.

It's really a question of what game are you trying to play as a business owner? If my game was to grow and grow and grow and like become another logitech, I should look at my margins. But if my game is to provide something of supreme value to people who recognize what that is and understanding that my thing is a niche, I make a niche product and I want to build for and optimize for longevity, not for scale, but for longevity to still be here in 5 10 15 who knows how many years i'm good it's a question of of what game you choose to play that also goes with the fact that we don't have investors our indiegogo backers are the og you know investors in a sense they they

invested in a keyboard they got a keyboard and that's And that's how we got our start. And that's it. We are fully, fully, like I say, no to capital. I have people trying to give me money every now and then. I'm like, no, sorry. Like, no, we're good. That's good. This person you mentioned who bought the OG

Ergodox EZ back in the Kickstarter day, I guess, or the Indiegogo days. Sorry, I used Kickstarter because it's like Xerox, you know? Is it a Xerox? Is it a copy? I don't know. This person or that kind of person, that persona, let's just say, when it comes to a business, when you look at that kind of person who's purchased nine years ago or the oldest of

purchases, how much money do you make off of that person? Do they come back and rebuy anything because you have this sustainable, which I totally agree with. I'm just wondering how that hits the bottom line. And I know that you're optimizing for that sustainability and longevity, but realistically a customer who is that old or that length of a customer and they buy the thing one time way back, how do you make more money off of them? How do you kind of vertically grow within one customer? Is it referrals?

Is it recommendations? Is it happiness? And they're doing a talk at a conference and they're showing up their keyboard and it's like it's infectious because they meet people and they're an influencer, just whatever. How does that work?

So it's a good question. It's not something I think about and it's not something I optimize for. For me, what I care about in like kind of an ideal scenario is you buy the one keyboard once and you are done. Keyboard people call that end game. You got your keyboard, it's working and this is it. And for many people, we do hit that and we provide support like in firmware for a long, long time. And our warranty is fairly generous as well. So there are many people who buy the one keyboard and they're done. But those people then often do two things. One is they subscribe to our newsletter. We have, I'm sorry, I'm being very immodest here. We have a very good newsletter. It's not, it's called the ergo. It's not about only keyboards. It's kind of a more, it's once a month and we put a lot into it. And those people subscribe and they stay engaged.

Like I get fan mail for the newsletter every month. I get people writing back and saying, oh, I love this issue. I use this. We recommend tools from across the web. We recommend resources, whatever. So they remain engaged. And then the other thing they do is, yes, they talk about us. We pretty much rely on that because we don't work with influencers. We don't advertise at all. We don't work with

a PR firm like you guys came to me and I'm very happy to be here, but it's not like somebody reached out to you like, oh, can you know, it's's just all organic and what i found is that there is a ton of goodwill when people sense that you're being real that you're not trying to scale that you're not thinking of your your software as a service move and how can i charge a subscription fee for this keyboard or for this thing or when you are just simply making a good thing and trying to keep doing just that, it really resonates. And we have people who really like ZSA and who like our keyboards, and they do share with friends, friends, family, co-workers. And it also helps that the keyboard is so weird looking. You have it on your desk in an office if you work in an office people

do routinely stop and say what is that and then our customers really talk they really do open up they're not like ah it's a keyboard no because it's kind of more than that for them for customers who get it yeah so yeah that's that's kind of how it works. I noticed on your homepage for ergodocs-easy.com, a couple scrolls down, Linus Tech Tips. Watch the full review. How did this come about? You said you don't work with influencers. Was this natural? Yeah, they emailed me.

Is that right? Because they said, we finally are reviewing this thing. You know, like it's been a wait. They just emailed you and like, hey, give us one and we'll review it. No, so that's not how I work. I'm pretty selective. So they reached out and I know they're big. That's great.

It doesn't mean that they're the right people to review the product. So then I always have a call and I kind of get to know them and set expectations. And like, this is it. To review a keyboard like that, if you think you're going to review my keyboard in two or three days, what? No, that's not going to work. You need to have some time with it.

You need to really spend time. You need to have a little bit of background. If you are a reviewer, you need to know what else is out there to have comparables. So I had a call with them, looked like a good fit. I sent them a keyboard. They took their time and eventually they published. I don't often read the comments, but on this same post, we'll link it up in the show notes because it's linked from your homepage as well. But you might like this comment. It's kind of funny. We'll see how it goes.

Jake, Jake Boom, five years ago says, I feel like if I invested in this keyboard, my life would inevitably spiral out of control. There's a twist, I promise. I'd fall into a vicious chase of ergonomic custom keyboard perfection. Six months later, I'd be under a bridge somewhere, frantically swapping key switches to scratch that itch I'll never quite be able to reach. Wow. How does that resonate with you? I love it.

So it's all a question of what game are you playing? For some people, it is a hobby. Yes, there are people who get an ErgoDoxyZ and then that's kind of their gateway, you know, and they play with it. I'm like, oh, wow, that's great. And then they go and they build one because nowadays there's kits, there's really great kits. You can even get like pre-assembled kits. It's everything is so much more developed now than when we started that. Yeah, for sure. We do see it all the time, but some people just want to get their work done. They get a keyboard, they're happy and they move on with life. But as a hobby, I'm biased obviously, but keyboards are very cool in my opinion. Like it's a, it's quite a fun hobby. I almost feel like I need one of these, Jared.

I kind of feel like I need... I feel like they're right up your alley, Adam. To taste the rainbow. I need to taste this rainbow, bro. I think you do. Here's my question in light of that, Eric, is why a product line? Because you have now Voyager. You have Moonlander.

Yeah. No, that is such a great question. I love that question because I had never imagined we would get here. When we started, we made the Ergodox CZ, that was the Indiegogo, and then it was time to make a website to go with it. So I got ErgodoxCZ.com because that's what we were making. And that was the thing. And then for a good few years, that was it.

And then we got this idea. We were like, you know what? What if the thumb cluster moved? Like what if the whole keyboard was way, way thinner and you could actually move the thumb cluster? And we started playing around with that, and we realized that makes a significant difference. We basically, again, the Ergodox, the OG Ergodox is not my design.

It's not by ZSA. It's by Docs, by Dominique. And it was optimized for hobbyists originally, right? Like it was actually, people would make it out of a sandwich of acrylic. Like they would take a few layers of acrylic and that was the case, like acrylic, then the circuit board, then some more acrylic and, you know.

And when we made it into the Ergodox CZ, obviously we modified it. We redesigned everything for manufacturing, but it was still that Ergodox at heart. For example, when we came out with a backlit version, not all keys are backlit. The thumb cluster is not backlit, not because we got lazy, but because the original design did not allow for it. So we were kind of stuck with that.

And after a few years, we felt, wow, you know, there's enough interest here. We have enough of a community. There's, yeah, and we have a good idea. Let's do it. And that was the Moonlander. And then the Moonlander was out for a few years. It's all kind of organic. Like we thought, hmm, what if there was, we looked at a laptop and we thought, what if

there was a keyboard that really went with it? A keyboard that you could lean up, you could tent it against the sides of the laptop. We don't show an image like that on the site, but it's very possible with a Voyager. And it's something that people do. And you just kind of set both halves of the keyboard, each half kind of like, so that it's half on the laptop and mostly on the desk. We even have rubberized sides to support that so it doesn't slide on you. These are secrets.

These are not things you necessarily see on the website. We don't highlight them. But we did a lot of work for those rubberized sides. The shell is a double shot shell. The shell of the Voyager is made from a mix of ABS and silicon that we inject very precisely for those legs. And we had this idea and then these very thin key switches called chalk switches started appearing, made by Kale. And for a long time, I was a little bit on the fence because it is a proprietary part.

If you look at the Moonlander and the Ergodox, we use cherry style switches and the patent on those expired, which means they're going to be around for a long, long time because anybody can make them and many companies do. So when the time came to make the Voyager, we really wanted an ultra, ultra thin board, still with like a steel back plate, like something that's very rigid, but very thin. So we opted for those switches. And we opted for an even more minimal layout, like fewer keys. And yeah, that's where we are today. Love it. Makes a lot of sense in that context when i just land on the website i kind of get the paradox of choice of like these all look good how am i gonna pick the one that's not right for me you know that problem it's it's a huge issue and not

just that there's like real costs to picking because it's not like there's nowhere to just try them out right so if you pick one yeah that's that's something i think a lot about and and we try to be very clear about the differences and we have those printouts and everything most people tend to be happy with their choice but we do have people who are like oh i want to ship this one back and get a different one instead and they do that they ship they get a full refund and the shipping is on you unfortunately which is expensive because you do ship back to taiwan so that's expensive or some people resell locally to friends or people like on facebook marketplace or whatever and then they

get another one but again that's a minority for the most part people do tend to be happy with whatever they choose. Yeah, the Voyager looks rad as a laptop user. I love the idea of just butting it up on either side of my laptop. I love it. I got to say, out of all keyboards, my personal favorite is definitely the Voyager. Again, I'm biased because the Voyager, my little secret there is the Voyager was the first keyboard where I personally designed the geometry. The location, the position of every key on the Voyager, the exact angle of the thumb cluster, that's me.

That's me. And that happens to be very, very comfortable for me, for my particular hands. What do you know? Right. very very comfortable for me for my particular hands what do you know right so i've been typing on the voyager since it was just a circuit board before before it had a shell when we were just starting out i got like the first functional circuit boards they had little rubber feet on them and i just plugged in the circuit board put a few like put keys on it and that was it voyager ever since nice yeah now do you use a traditional mouse i use a trackball personally okay i use a trackball called the kensington expert mouse okay it is a trackball i don't know why they called it that way it looks like something

designed in the late 90s i'm pretty sure it actually was it's massive it is wired i love it i've been using the same physical one for i think 11 years now and where do you place that in between the halves closer to my left half i'm a lefty so i use i use a pointing device with my left hand so it's right i have that to have shoulder width so they're pretty far apart and then right up against the left half is my trackball gotcha from from the inside inside again i'm moving my hand inwards to get to the inside of the keyboard yeah not to the outside yeah yeah input devices there's kind of the rub because i am a trackpad fanboy haven't't used a mouse for years. Don't like, never particularly liked mice. I've used trackballs.

I actually really liked the Nubbin, which is what I call it, on the old IBMs. Now Lenovo, I suppose, where they put it right there inside the home row. And it's that little red rubber thing. I actually liked that. I liked that because my fingers could stay at the home row, which is also why I like the trackpad it's so proximately close to the space bar i mean you're just right there i've always felt like the mouse was like a big motion out to the side of course you could put it right next to your

keyboard but that's why the voyager is attractive because i still would want to use my trackpad i wouldn't want to adopt a keyboard or excuse me i wouldn't want to adopt a mouse that's right if if you do i use my laptop in clamshell mode with an external monitor so for me the keyboard is just on the disc but if you actually really do use the laptop on your disc then you kind of you know prop the voyager is half halves on the laptop right and then yeah your trackpad is right there by your thumb adam you use like a wake-up tablet don't you yeah my setup is uh is interesting so i have trackpad like normal way over here on the left wireless wireless keyboard also wireless right here in the center and then a wacom what is this an intuos pro oh wow do you

draw do you do create digital art no i just prefer it over a mouse. I just like to write. I've never had any wrist pain anymore. That's awesome. So I just keep this thing in my hand like I'm writing, and I mouse with my pen, and it's just natural the way it fits into my hand. I don't have to like, you know, people get into this mode. I'm making a claw.

The claw, yeah. Right, the claw is what really gets people. And so I can always like, you said keep motion earlier in the show you said keep moving around this method allows me to move around my trackpad is independent my keyboard is independent and the intuos pro is like my mouse and it's independent you know so i can move around a lot that is very cool that's a really cool use of of uh of a wake-up actually yeah just use it as a mouse yeah i'd never heard anybody do that until Adam. Yeah. I can't go back.

I like to, so my track pads on the left, so my left hand is what I scroll and move and things like that with. And obviously I'm clicking and moving windows and stuff like that with my right hand with the Wacom. And then the keyboard's in the middle. So when I'm dedicated to typing or doing whatever, it's just right there in the middle.

So you're, you're cutting down on a bunch of repetitive movement right there because you're basically splitting your mouse hand. Stuff that other people do with the same hand and in the same posture, you're using two hands for it and in different positions. That's so interesting. And it's cool how it just works in my brain too.

I just feel like I can scroll and tap. It's just so fast. It's really just a fast. Cause you'd be scrolling with one hand and then like clicking with the other hand. Really? Interesting. Yeah. No, but do you do that?

Well, there's no really scenarios where you do that at the same time, are there? You don't really need to scroll and click. No, but like consecutively right after one another, perhaps. But yeah, not simultaneously, I would think. So as an example, I'm just scrolling on the, you know, this website called called zsa i'll say it your way zsa.io slash voyager right i'm scrolling it and like mousing around so i can touch things

and click things and buttons so my left hand is scrolling up and down the page to scan and zoom and look and whatnot and i can easily click on you know try oryx or whatever else you've got going on because my hand on the right side is this mouse and it's just able to move along while scrolling with my left hand. That's super interesting because what you're describing is a split mouse. It is. We're talking about split keyboards, but what you got there is a split mouse, which isn't really something I considered. That is so interesting. And honestly, Wacom has no competition as a mouse. So I use this as a mouse and I have been for 15 years. I mean, just so long, it's, I've just never, I think I've had to buy, and to your

credit, maybe on the sustainability side, I've had to buy several over the years. And I think it's mainly been because they eventually wear out. The pen wears out. I can't get replacement parts for it. Some of them switch out, but like I might lose it. I don't know. Just things happen. I think I may have bought three potentially over my whole entire usability career of doing it like this.

Yeah. I think that's a lot because it's about 300 bucks each roughly. Oh, yeah. You know, 200 bucks. So that's, you know know quite an investment but like it's nice i would encourage you to consider my way and maybe make a wacom killer because you can make it better that's more sustainable to their credit they do a great job with the surfaces being able to be replaced so over time the surface the surface, because I'm always rubbing my hand,

my full hand on the surface. Right, getting grease on it. Yeah, like my hand gets grease, you see a pattern there, all this stuff. You can peel that off and replace it. And I've done that several times too. I did not know that. I've graduated from smaller ones to bigger ones, which I think was mainly why I upgraded over the years.

Or I got a new one, was like want more space in my in my uh my area now the there are some I guess compatibility challenges which you will always have in a third-party device that is not first-party native keyboard which is one of my other concerns is like well how compatible can it be with every application and you can only do so much customization. But the point is, is that I think there's room in there because this does way more than I need. I don't use any of the extra keys. I just don't have a need for it. Maybe I can find a use for it, but I just haven't.

So I basically just disable everything that is the tablet and I'll only use it for an input device. And that's it. That's super interesting. How'd you get the idea? Did you like, what got you started on Wacom? I think a friend of mine a long time ago, his name is Donald Kilgore. DK is what I call him because it's his initials, DK. He did it and he's a left-hander and he and I,

and I have in the past been an illustrator and done more in creative programs. But so initially I got it for those reasons because I wanted to have a true input device for it. But then it became my way. And I do that stuff less now, but the way stayed with me. So I didn't abandon the ship because I did less illustration or less in Photoshop or whatever. It was very helpful in those applications, but now it's just the way for me. And so I was influenced by somebody

else. And I think they did it similar where they had the trackpad like that, like this configuration. I tried it out too and just never stopped. That's awesome. That's really interesting. I am thinking though, how the Voyager can fit right here in the middle for this keyboard. So it's a funny setup. Actually, your is is the opposite of most people's because most people they put the keyboard and then there's lots of room in the middle for a cat we we actually have a whole page on the site dedicated to photos of cats in the middle. Like that's a whole place. That's hilarious, man. Cats and keyboards. See, it's feline approved. But in your case, it's like you're going to have the keyboard in the middle

and your split mouse off to the side. That's really interesting. Have you ever considered accounting for the mouse somehow? Like split keyboard integrated mouse device? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. somehow like split keyboard integrated mouse device oh yeah oh yeah actually just this month we um we published an amazing uh tutorial by robin one of our support people who created a trackpad for the voyager it's an amazing it's right now it's a diy thing it's like a mod we're super diy friendly like we always people like 3d print all sorts of attachments and things

like that and we tend to share those out and highlight them or whatever they color their keys and stuff like that but this particular mod adds a circular trackpad right next to the voyager and it looks like it was made for it robin created a beautiful thing there. And once I saw it, I was like, oh, maybe we can make something like that. So, you know, the DIY version is out right now. People can go in and make it actually. And some people already are. But we are definitely looking at offering something more polished and built in. Yeah. What's up, friends?

I'm here with Cal Carberry, co-founder and CTO at Coder.com. So Coder.com is a cloud development environment, a CDE, and you run on all the clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, you run on-prem, and you're no stranger to competition, right? The competition out there is well-known, but what shocks you? What surprises you about the state of cloud development environments

and how developers are leveraging them? You know, it actually shocked me. The majority of our largest provision customers do not use containers with their development environments. They actually use VMs on like GCP, AWS, or some kind of mixture of them. One of the largest auto manufacturers, they have like a little bit over a thousand devs

that use Coder every day, and they use a mixture of Azure, AWS, and GCP. So I've used Docker, I've used VMs, but take me into the technical details. What is it that's different between a VM and running something in Docker? Kind of like all existing solutions, like kind of our competitors in the market all really have a container-based approach where you build like a Docker container and developers work inside of that. And it faces a couple of limitations because, you know, Adam, like if, you know, on your machine right now, 100% you're not working inside of a Docker container doing

this discussion, right? It's just very different. So there's a lot of software expectations that actually don't really work inside of a container. An example is a customer of ours is Square and they do stuff with a payment terminal. And so they need essentially like hardware accelerated Android. That is just really finicky to get working in a container. You totally can pass DevKVM into a container and get hardware accelerated virtualization, but it's a little trickier and a little more janky. And so they'd rather just be like, no, the simple thing is give everyone a VM. There's no point to change the way that we work in entirety to do some weird virtualization jank. It just makes more sense to give them a VM that we know works.

Well, it might be time to consider a cloud development environment. And open source is awesome. And Coder is fully open source. You can go to Coder.com, get a demo or try it right now, or even start a 30-day trial of Coder Enterprise. Once again, Coder.com, that's C-O-D-oder Enterprise. Once again, Coder.com. That's C-O-D-E-R.com. Coder.com.

And I'm also here with Todd Kaufman, CEO of Test Double. TestDouble.com. You may know Test Double from our good friend, Justin Searles. So, Todd, on your homepage, I see an awesome quote from Eileen. You could tell. She says, quote, Hot take. Just have Test Double build all your stuff. End quote. We did not pay Eileen for that quote, to be clear,

but we do very much appreciate her sharing it. Yeah, we had the great fortune to work with Eileen and Aaron Patterson on the upgrade of GitHub's Ruby Rails framework. And that's a relatively complex problem. It's a very large system. There's a lot of engineers actively working on it at the same time that we were performing that upgrade. So being able to collaborate with them, achieve the outcome of getting them upgraded to the latest and greatest Ruby on Rails that has all of the security patches and everything that you would expect of the more modern versions of the framework, while still like not holding their business back from delivering features,

we felt was a pretty significant accomplishment. And it's great to, you know, work with someone like Eileen and Aaron because we obviously learned a lot. We were able to collaborate effectively with them, but to hear that they were delighted by the outcome as well is very humbling for sure. Take me one layer deeper on this engagement.

How many folks did you apply to this engagement? What was the objective? What did you do, et cetera? Yeah, I think we had between two and four people at any phase of the engagement. So we tend to run with relatively small teams. We do believe smaller teams tend to be more efficient and more productive. So wherever possible, we try to get by with as few people as we can. With this project, we were working directly with members from GitHub as well.

So there were full-time staff on GitHub who were collaborating with us day in, day out on the project. This was a fairly clear set of expectations. We wanted to get to Rails, I believe 5.2 at the time and Ruby like 2.5. Don't hold me to those numbers, but we had clear expectations at the outset. So from there, it was just a matter of figuring out the process that we were going to pursue to get these upgrades done without having a sizable impact on their team. A lot of the consultants on the project had some experience doing Rails upgrades, maybe not at that scale at that point, but it was really exciting because we were able to kind of

develop a process that we think is very consistent in allowing Rails upgrades to be done without providing a lot of risk to the client. So there's not a fear that, hey, we've missed something or this thing's going to fall over under scale. We do it very incrementally so that the team can, as like I said, keep working on feature delivery without being impacted, but also so that we are very certain that we've covered all the bases and really got the system to a state where it's functionally equivalent to the last version, just on a newer version of Rails and Ruby. Very cool, Todd. I love it. Find out more about Test Double's software investment

problem solvers at testdouble.com. That's testdouble.com, T-E-S-T-D-O-U-B-L-E.com. What does it take to go from this DIY proof of concept to adoption and production? Like what would it take to make that become real? Oh, a whole bunch of things. So first of all, when you have the mechanical design, even if you have something you can 3D print, you need to completely redo it because designing for 3D printing and designing for injection molding

is two totally different things. So you make the shell. And then of course, once you have a shell, you pay for the tooling. That's very expensive. That's like, depending on the size of the mold, but it can get, you know, in the tens of thousands of dollars for a mold, things like that.

Then you got the plastic done. And that's a bunch of iterations because you also iterate on things like the surface texture. How does it feel? And injection mold tooling is interesting because some things are irreversible. It's literally a physical mold. So if you decide to make a change, you can't put it back later. Like some changes, when you decide, it's like if it doesn't work, you need to scrap the mold and literally start over again.

So it's a fairly intense process. And that gets you the plastic at the end. That is if you just go ABS. For the Voyager shell, we had to do it even more complicated because, like I said, that shell is made of two materials. And that's a whole other thing. Then you got the electronics. So for the electronics, when you make them at scale, when you're like a real manufacturer and not a hobbyist at home, you need to get the electronics certified, CE and FCC certification, which means that it's up to code.

It can be legally imported. It's not going to burn your house or your computer. It's a real thing. And that certification is pretty grueling. Like they go and they literally zap your product. Like they shock it with an electrostatic, like they have a little thing, like a mini cattle prod thing that they stick in there. Like they find whatever gaps you have in your case, like then stick it in there and they zap your product and see what happens and make sure that, you know, if it actually reboots, for example, and continues to work and things like that. So then you have certification.

And then for us, of course, a huge part is going to be the software around it. It needs to be easy to configure. It needs to, the keyboard would have to work well without it and it would have to be easy to add it on and customize it in ways that make sense and then of course there is explaining what the heck did you do which is its own thing right like there needs to be just a sane looking web page that clearly and truthfully and without hype explain what the thing is which is a lot it's lot. It's one of the things I actually do last. I think some companies start there.

I do it at the end because I like holding the thing when I write the copy. The copy on the website is mine. I wrote the copy across both sites. So by holding a very late stage prototype, let's say, I can write without feeling that it's marketing BS. I can write and say, no, this is really the thing. That's cool.

Yeah. I would say there's a path I would personally take, not this DIY method, because I'm just thinking through what it would be like to use a Voyager in this configuration since I walked y'all through how I do it. I think I would just probably just take this existing Apple trackpad

because I already own it. Like you said before, take what you already own, and I would pop it right in that corner or somewhere on the inside of the left keyboard so that I can still be spread out. And I might change my configuration, but my hand that does the work is still doing the work. And so the left side of my keyboard can go on the outside,

the left outside of my trackpad. The trackpad would be on the inside right of the left side of the keyboard, and then my Wacom can be to the right of the right side of the keyboard that's split on the other side. And kind of like split it like that to see if I like it because I think that could actually work out. That's assuming I like this split keyboard. And then if you have access to a 3D printer, Because I think that could actually work out. That's assuming I like this split keyboard.

And then if you have access to a 3D printer, you could possibly print out a really simple wedge that just kind of lifts your trackpad a little bit and maybe angles it inwards just a bit. Yeah. Or rather, angles it towards the keyboard, I should say, which is really outwards, but it's towards your left hand. And it will be the right height and will be leaning towards you ever so slightly. Sounds. Yeah, I think I think there's something there.

Yeah, because those bottom two keys on the left side, I imagine, would probably get in the way of the trackpad is too close. You could have it like poke out the top a little bit. You could you could like lift it, you know, so that the top of the trackpad is higher than the top of the keyboard. Can we talk about voiding warranties? Sure. We have many tutorials for fun ways to void your warranty. We are all about that. So one thing people should know, opening up a product, if you spoke to iFixit, I'm sure they mentioned that as well, but some people still don't know that opening up a product does not void your warranty. The warranty is still, you can flip a product over, open it up, look inside, warranty is still valid. Where the warranty becomes void

is any user caused damage. Let's say you opened it up and then you spilled Coke in there, that's hard for me to cover. But basically, the warranty, it's a two-year warranty at base. You can extend it to four years. And you can extend it at the time of order. I don't do the thing like Apple do where you can extend it after you buy because that feels like kind of a desperate upsell to me like I don't love it I think it's more respectful of people to just say well you looked at the accessory store that was your decision I respect your decision that's it I'm

not gonna haunt you with are you sure you don't want to pay a little more for two more years but if at the time of purchase you make make that decision, you get four years. And that's a very no BS warranty in the sense that if there is any problem, our support team is amazing. We are 11 people in the company, not including the manufacturing side.

Four of us are full-time support. I would say four and a half because half my time is in the support inbox. But it's four of us are full-time support extremely good at what they do that is the core of our marketing really we like that is how because that the whole I think it's shocking to people when they buy a product and then they need help and then you actually help them. People are so surprised when that

happens. It's quite funny, like some people write already being very defensive. They write with a sort of attitude of, I know you're not going to help me, and I'm pissed, but I'm going to just lay out my case right here. And then I go, okay, yeah. And then we help them. And they're like, what just happened? Somebody listened, and it wasn't like some AI chatbot thing. So the warranty is comprehensive. It's handled by human beings who do not make you go through a bunch of forms. And if you want to mod the keyboard,

we are all for that. We show you all sorts of ideas while making it very clear that when you're modding it, you are doing away with a warranty. And some people actually wait for the warranty to expire before they do that. But bottom line is, I think if you own something, you should own it. It should be yours. You should be able to void the warranty on the thing productively like i can certainly void the warranty on my iphone but i can't do anything

productive with that i'll just have a broken iphone so you know what i mean i asked that question because i found on your very well designed i would say and then also well written blog spray painting your zSA keyboard, not a render. I saw this, I was like, this is cool. And it's an article on how to spray paint your keyboard. And the very first thing it says in important disclaimers is this will void your warranty. Yeah. You know, but still yet, just like iFixit, you kind of have similar, you're kind of cut from similar cloths as iFixit. And the fact that they care about repairability, they care about, you know, owning,

they care about rights to access and fix or mod or change. I do wonder, now I don't know how your business could work with this, but if you can have a modified warranty, like if you followed a guide to do this thing, could you have a modified, where like the core components of like the keyword

functionality of like the key pressing is still warrantied when all you did was take it apart spray paint the thing and it's a cosmetic thing i just wonder that might be too hard to enforce though well what we do there so it's it's a really interesting question because it's very important to be honest with people set the the right expectations, and not disappoint. And the word warranty has a lot of connotations to it. It means we'll pick up the tab. It's ours to take care of. And once you mod it, that is a statement of ownership.

You own the thing. So what we'll do there is not so much warranty because you took the responsibility fun fact by the way in hebrew my first language warranty and responsibility is the same word is that right it's the same word yeah warranty and responsibility it's one word in hebrew what's the hebrew word can you say it okay so you took responsibility for your for your possession for your thing so the you are warranting your own work where but warranty not having warranty does not mean not having support the warranty can be void but will still support you which means if you need parts we'll sell you parts you don't need to

buy a whole new keyboard it's not a gotcha type of thing oh you messed it up now you need a new keyboard no no no if you messed up just the circuit board, I will, you know, we can sell you just that circuit board. We sell individual parts and pieces for you to like fix whatever happened. And like, we'll spend time with you to help you like troubleshoot, figure out what went wrong and all that. Have you written that up?

Because I would then go back to every guide you've written. And from point number one, not just tell them you void the warranty, but even if you do void your warranty link to this thing where you still have support because that's that's unclear that's so interesting yeah i guess i should i guess i should it's like i'm so careful of upselling like of trying to yeah because because i don't want to make it seem like yeah we'll sell you parts like we make a bunch of money on these parts we don't actually but you know it's like you can always buy parts like i'm afraid of that tone you know i hear that i hear that but i think you know if you want to go down the i fix it calwines direction they unabashedly sell products

yeah right no you're right. We should probably link to We Sell Parts. We have a whole post, by the way, called Right to Repair. Yeah. Directly inspired by iFixit, where we have, we list what parts we offer and we even list prices for the parts right there. So you're not like surprised when you email to ask for the parts. It's all right there on the blog.

To the note of expectation and clarity, I think that sets more expectation and clarity than not seeming like you're upselling because I don't think you're trying to. You're just trying to give, hey, have fun, DIYers. Have fun, modders and hackers. Do it. Yeah. And if you do, we're still here for you. We won't fix it on our dime, but if it needs fixed, we're here to help you. We have not a whole new keyboard to sell you, but just the one part that you may have accidentally spray painted on when you're modding this thing and you still got that support. I feel like that's a bit more of a net than feeling like you're trying to upsell people.

I'm taking that on board. I love it. Maybe by the time you listen to this episode, if you go to that spray paint blog post, the link is there. Put it there. Yeah. Especially if you've written it up. I mean, if it's already there, I think if you overly explain even your generosity and your desire to be sustainable, I think if, if that is your brand, then it won't feel like what you're trying not to feel like. It will feel like more support than it will feel like upsell. I love it. But I like this too.

I was like, that's cool. And I was surprised by the guide to spray paint it. And I was even more surprised by the very first line, which was this will void your warranty. I was like, that's, it's cool that you just,

that you disclosed that. Cause I might, you know, venture into uncharted territories or voyage into uncharted territories and, and void my warranty unbeknownst to me, but you've told me and you've given me a path to fix my stuff if I break it. And you're right. If I choose to mod my thing, I'm taking ownership. It's a choice to own.

So Ares, you have a lot of business practices that I would say are laudable of our ethos we vehemently agree with a lot of the things you're saying and yet they're counterculture things like we don't advertise

that's counterculture that's not even necessarily one that I agree with but a lot of your right to repair ownership, longevity, things that matter to you, your customer service emphasis is refreshing, of course. I'm curious where a lot of this stuff comes from in terms of where do you learn these things, pick them up,

then you learn them as you go. And then I want to eventually somehow weave our way into, you also made a deck of cards, like WTF, you know? Yes, that's true. We made a deck of cards. Which is again, kind of like out there in left field a little bit. But where's your decision making process with a lot of these things or where'd you learn to be like this? It's a good question. So I like to read.

Okay. so i like to read okay i started with uh seth coden which talks a lot about permission marketing and all that then um there's this uh denim this gene maker in the uk called hute that's h-i-u-t okay that's the company the guy's name is davidatt. I'm probably mispronouncing his last name. And he's been doing some really interesting things around marketing. And he wrote a book called Do Open, which is a book about email marketing. And before that, I spent years working on an email marketing product. I used to be a developer for Mad Mimi and then Go Daddy. And that kind of exposed me to the power of email marketing, which is really all the marketing

we do, that one email a month. And that email carries the company in terms of like outreach, let's say. Obviously, there's other forums like the support I mentioned, but in terms of like us telling people about what we do, it's that email. As an individual, I can be somewhat picky. I have opinions. So a lot of our marketing practices and non-practices are me expressing my emotions productively shall we say like if something makes me mad or I disagree with like I I don't love being inundated with ads I don't love watching videos online trying to decide if I want to buy something and

not knowing if the person talking was paid to say what they're saying because not everybody discloses so as a company like we will never ever ever pay for coverage because because as an individual like that that that decision is not informed by business considerations it's informed by my lived experience as an individual where i want to be able to watch something online and like trust this person and know okay yeah they weren't getting paid maybe they got the keyboard or maybe they got whatever it is they're reviewing and they're disclosing that, but at least, you know, they didn't get paid. So a lot of those decisions come from feelings.

I think emotions are a valid decision-making tool, not necessarily in the moment. You shouldn't make a decision in anger. But if I'm feeling a certain way, I can sit with it for a while and think about it and then come up with something productive to do or not do there. I don't know if that's a good answer. No, it's good answers. You pointed to a few resources. You told us about your personal experience and how a lot of your a lot of its taste it's your taste expressed into a business that's yeah it's a very idiosyncratic type of uh of

business uh sure yeah if you look in the newsletter we send out every month i pick five things i liked from across the web those are not articles articles. They're usually tools, interesting resources. And I share those. And then we went and made a subscriber only archive. And as a subscriber, it's free, but for people who are subscribed to the newsletter and you click in and you go through years and years of these. And for me, as the guy who found the links, it's so weird and interesting because it's like this personal archive of stuff I liked, but it's all shit. It's all out there. And it's this work that I've been building for years. Well, here's how we get to the card deck because this newsletter, which is so important to you as a business to have that connection with your customers, potential customers,

and the people who come across you on the internet, this monthly newsletter has a carrot on a stick. And the carrot is, if you sign up, it's a free newsletter, 10% off ZSA cards. That's right. Which is your card deck. Now, that's a nice little carrot, I think. It's not like giving away too much, but it's giving away something. And this card

project is unique and different can you tell us about it for sure so i had this idea why don't we make some merch it'll be fun to have merch you know to have some things that say that people can maybe wear or whatever and um i thought oh t-shirts and then i went to sleep and i woke up super bored at the idea of making t-shirts like really t-shirts and at the time like i'm quite into board games and you know tabletop and things like that not not rpg so much but certain board games and i was thinking a lot about your standard deck of cards which is such an incredibly versatile tool i'm talking the deck of cards you can get at any store not mine just your regular you know 52 card deck sure you have one of those in your pocket or in your glove compartment that's that's a gaming

system that is a portable gaming system just a regular deck of cards you can do so much with it like one person two person games you can have four people and there's like entire books and there's websites by the way an awesome website pagat p-a-g-a-t dot com that's a website dedicated to card games all you need is a deck of cards and i saw that and i was like wow man like i i i wonder if there's a way to make a deck of cards and I saw that and I was like wow man like I wonder if there is a way to make a deck of cards that is even more versatile like that you can do even more with and use in even more ways and what do you know I'm not the first who had that idea and I embarked on a little research expedition and I found all sorts of these are called multi-. And I found all sorts of, these are called multi-decks. I found all sorts of these so-called multi-decks.

And one of them was particularly great. It was, it is, it's around, it's called the Everdeck. And it's by this very talented designer called Will Su, Willem Su. And he did something super creative there with very elegantly adding on cards and fleshing out the idea of a card deck, but making it super powered. So I emailed him and he said,

hey, well, you know, maybe we can do something like maybe you can advise us on our own card deck that would borrow some of your data structures because a card deck is really a data structure, if you think about it. So that would let us borrow, or it's really multiple data structures bound up together. So if you could help us kind of design that, the data architecture, and he helped us, he was very gracious, very generous, helped us come up with what would be the numbers on the cards or things like that.

And then I took oblique strategies. Are you familiar with that? No. Okay. So that's Brian Eno, the musician. And he, way back in the 70s, I think, came up with a deck of cards that just had slogans on them, had phrases that would help you break through creative ruts. And that was really inspiring to me.

And so I wanted to include not those direct ones, of course, but similar in similar vein and slowly over the course. And then, of course, we wanted some of the cards to have graphics on them all the cards have graphics but we wanted some in full color so then we made that into a complete art ensemble project where we paid eight different artists each to make a part of the deck in their own style and then we get to feature those artists and share who they are and all that and then of course came the manufacturing part which was also its own adventure because this product is made in

China it's actually our first product that's made in China and that was a whole exploration around okay so how do I guarantee manufacturing conditions in China and it turns out the toy industry has its own certification to make sure that the product is made ethically. And how do I make sure the paper is sustainable? And that was a whole adventure there. And ta-da, a deck of cards. It's 120 cards. They come in two boxes. Like you have an overall big box, which then contains two smaller packs that are like pocket-sized.

And you can play any card game with it, like any existing card game with it, but you can also play a bunch of modern different card games with it. We are actually in the process of writing an entire book about ZSA cards right now, featuring both how you can use it for games, but also how you can use it

as part of your creative process or in a team building context to kind of as an icebreaker to open up communication there to, or to people as conversation cards. So if you are a game designer or you know one who might be interested, email me and we'll talk because we're currently working on this book and collecting games.

That's so wild. That's deeper than I ever imagined. Yeah. It was, it was an adventure. It was like a good, a deep one. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I love the thought process. I love all the, it's not just attention to detail. It's like, I would just say probably thoughtfulness, you know,

I love car games. We recently took up a game called Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's so cool. My kids love it. I mean, like, we could just play that for hours, and it's so fun. That is a fun one.

And obviously, my youngest is usually last to slam his hand down, and so I take the cards on his behalf, as any dad should, you know? Love it. It's really cool though i can explain the game but it's not part of the show i'll do it in post-show if necessary that's awesome i would recommend the game though that's cool to to use this as a team building exercise and just all the thoughtfulness into in a way to extend a card game really yeah and it's actually interesting that we got there from marketing because this is my marketing tool like every card has the zsa logo on it and uh when i showed the deck to someone for the first time

he kind of took the card and flipped it over and was like what's zsa i was like score it works right i mean that's that's exactly i found it fun and interesting to create a marketing product that actually takes people away from the screen and into contact with other humans in the same room and doing something socially. I thought that was very fun to try and contribute to. You know, there's a good idea well executed when you hear about it and you're like sitting over here thinking, why didn't we do this, Adam? This is so cool.

I wish it had been us eras that's how good this is i love it yeah thank you very much cards for the win yes that's awesome thank you well what haven't we plumbed here what haven't we asked you that you expected or is interesting anything else we've left on the table yeah no i think uh i think this was a lot of fun honestly i i always feel like i spoke too much i hope i didn't say anything too silly but uh yeah no i think i think it was quite wide ranging really i suppose we should now give a shout out to our listener who requested this episode sam edwards who pointed us towards Ares and these keyboards. And honestly,

we probably wouldn't have found you otherwise. So thank you, Sam. We've been doing this for a long time. Hadn't found you yet. So happy that we met now and got to have this conversation. You probably have some future customers here as Adam and I have been, you know, selecting our favorite keyboard throughout this conversation. And honestly, that deck of cards looks pretty rad too. So your unassuming sales pitch has worked on me. That's exciting. Thank you. So very cool.

To our other listeners, of course, you also can request episodes. We love to serve our audience and there's no better way to know that we're making at least one listener happy by actually doing episodes requested by you, all the listeners. So if you haven't yet, go to changelog.com slash request. Fill out the form. Let us know what you want to hear about on an upcoming interview.

That's all for me. Adam, Anything else? I'm going to, uh, Z S a dot fun RN just to see the cards. So there you go. You go. Very cool. Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you. It was an awesome conversation. Thank you for all of your thoughtfulness, as I said before, but just really just like the way that you carry yourself in your business. I mean, you're counter-cultural in so many ways, but you shouldn't be.

Yeah. And I think that's cool. Thank you very much. Well, who knew that making open source ergonomic keyboards could be so much fun from the Voyager to the Moonlander to Half Moon to the OG Ergodox EZ ZSA, as Eris says, is doing some really awesome stuff. And I'm sure there's a keyboard for everyone out there at ZSA.io. Now, should you go buy one? I don't know. That's up to you.

Am I going to go buy one? I don't know. Not yet. I am tempted, but I am a fan and I might. I'll let you know what I do. From being open source to sustainability to longevity to holding the prototype, the physical thing in his hand before he writes a single line of copy for the webpage. And all the business practices, to me, is so admirable. Check them out, zsa.io. If you pick one up, let us know. We want to hear

from you. And the easy way to do that is to go to changelog.com slash community. No imposters here. Everyone is welcome. And that means you. Now we do have a bonus for our plus plus subscribers. changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better. It is better.

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