I attended and spoke at KeyCon 2026! KeyCon is an annual mechanical keyboard convention in the United States. I’ve always wanted to go! It rotates locations every year, and this year it was in Chicago, so I had to attend on my home turf.

At these keyboard events (which I’ve written about before), people put their keyboards out on big tables and you get to try out the different setups and keycaps and switches that everyone has. It ends up being like a mechanical keyboard museum, where everyone’s displays are brought with a fair amount of nerdy passion.

My display was a similar set of keyboards that I’ve brought to meetups before. I did, however, include my latest build, the CSTM80 with DSA Royal Navy! This board is special to me. It’s made with a bunch of parts that you can’t buy anymore, and it was fun getting to geek out about that with folks who understand what a big deal it is for me to have what I have.

It was so great attending this year and meeting up with people, some of whom I hadn’t seen since my Seattle keyboard meetup days pre-pandemic!

Besides seeing and trying cool keyboards, I also gave a talk on Writer Decks, which was a really fun topic to speak about with this group.

I’ve written about my Micro Journal and my BYOK before, so if you’ve seen those posts, just imagine my talk is that, but with some more details and opinions about the Writer Deck community and the importance of controlling your computing. I put my fairly minimal slides in my talks repo if you want to check those out! There should be a video recording coming soon.

Having a place and time to be amongst people who geek out as much as you do (if not more so) on any given thing is the best. I love being a part of the mechanical keyboard community, and am so grateful to the organizers for making these events happen!