Called Fresh

I know nothing about keyboards, and even less about the ones used for typing. Given the choice between talking for half an hour on either keyboards, I’ll 100% pick the musical one.

But bosses have a tendency of rubbing off on you.

My ex-boss was passionate about keyboards. He was the co-founder of a series A startup I was working with. He was also the head of engineering and had hired great engineers who he had previously worked at grade A+ companies (think Amazon, Swiggy, Zomato, Google etc.).

Passion is contagious. And his passion for keyboards spread across the small startup. When I joined, I noticed that everybody’s desk was adorned with these multi-coloured, clickity-clakity things that I couldn’t make sense of. Why would you get this clunky thing, when macbooks come with this beautiful keyboard built-in.

But bosses have a tendency of rubbing off on you.

I imagined myself late at night. It’s dark except the white light from my laptop illuminating my face. You can see that I’m in deep focus. I stare at the screen for a while. I pause for a moment to think, to be sure that I have fully understood everything. And then I attack the keyboard. I type smoothly, rhythmically and uninterruptedly. My fingers are one with this beautiful keyboard that seems to be connected to my mind directly. My fingers don’t slip. The words fall out onto the google doc in paragraphs. And thus the perfect product document is born. It will change the course of the product, nay, the company, nay, the industry, nay the entire society. And it wouldn’t have been possible without my trusted keyboard.

Of course, that’s not how anything works. And that perfect document never came to be.

But months later, and after changing companies, I finally bought a mechanical keyboard.

It is a NinjaDog verna pro. It has white and orange keycaps and comes with red switches.

The keyboard is optimised for windows – and so works well with windows, and is absolutely dog shit for mac. I currently use both windows and mac on a daily basis and thus have this slightly unique insight.

My reference points are a Logi Pebble Keys 2, that I use for my Mac and a Portronics ($10 basic range) keyboard that I have been using with the windows computer.

The ninjadog mechanical keyboard takes some getting used to. Over the day, I’ve experienced that my finger slip a lot between keys. Also, the keyboard is much higher than what I’m used to, so typing for long causes stain on the wrist. I made a lot of mistakes in typing today. But the clickity-clackity sound of the mechanical keyboard is very pleasing. And when I do get into a rhythm of typing, I enjoy it.

Maybe there is a golden document waiting to be created after all.

Any way, this post isn’t really a review about anything. Like I said, I know nothing about keyboards. I just wanted to write something and this felt like an interesting topic to start off with – the instrument of writing.

I hope to write every weekday. 30 minutes. Ok see you.