Keyboardio Cometh, Pt 2

Part two of an n-part series. Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

I am more excited than ever about Keyboardio things now.

I got the shipping notification yesterday (October 17) and it is projected to arrive on Monday (October 23).

Maybe even more exciting to me though, I’ve not only been doing some more work on documenting Kaleidoscope things, but I’ve actually been asked by Algernon & another contributor (Simon a.k.a. TheBaronHimself) to help out with Chrysalis! Chrysalis is the Electron-based GUI that Algernon started building for GUI configuration of the Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards, so folks can do things like flash firmware, edit keymaps or make LED themes without having to use the Arduino IDE & write code. While both of them are pretty experienced with firmware-type programming, Chrysalis is written in ClojureScript, which neither of them are experts in. They noticed me talking about Clojure, I guess (I submitted a little bug fix to Chrysalis a few months ago), and now I’m going to be helping build things out!

It is so exciting being on a new project again – while I love my Bloom work, the projects there have not only reached a reasonably mature stage, but I know most of them inside and out. This is something very new to me, doing things that I haven’t done since school, but I still get to use a language that I love and even a familiar tookit – they’re even using re-frame for the interface stuff!

I haven’t really contributed significantly to an open-source project (besides my own stuff that I’ve open sourced, obviously) since Factor and I like the camaraderie that comes from such things. Even better, this is an open source project to make a useful tool for people – while Factor is awesome, it is a thing that is just for other programmers; this is something to help people that are interested, but maybe don’t want to dive full in to programming. I’ve found it so satisfying to be able to help people on the Keyboardio community forums already and I can’t wait to be able to help them out even more!

Helping other people, even if it’s something as silly and niche as helping them with fancy keyboards, feels really nice 😄.