Post 1: Life at home

Early August 2020 | By: Thuan D.

At this point, I had been officially working from home (WFH) for about 5 months. As an engineer, I was lucky to be able to WFH and our entire workforce had shifted to doing so. The adjustment to WFH had finally started to become routine, and the day-to-day was a bit more settled - basically, lots of video conferences and unresponsive CAD.

David kind of came into my room one day and was talking about macropads for some reason. As a dabbling mechanical keyboard enthusiast, I had heard of them, but never seriously considered one until that very moment. I realized how useful it could be for having keyboard shortcuts for video conferencing (mute, share screen, end meeting, etc). Did I really need one? Not really, but I was stuck at home, bored, and wanted a new gadget.

After digging around for awhile, I realized that there were a lot of different offerings, but there was always something that was missing from them for us. Whether it was design, size, materials (lots of 3D printed ones), number of buttons (usually too many buttons), or some other reason, we never found the one that either of us would buy and have as a permanent peripheral on our desk.

“We should just try and design one.” This was when we came up with the idea to design and make one ourselves. We had plenty of idle time and could afford to spend some time just prototyping, designing, etc. We made the decision to start from scratch and go through the entire process of designing a well-thought out, high quality product.

My desk setup. This took a few months of iterating while WFH to get to, but it’s what the current setup looks like.