My first time at a huge meetup for the Seattle Mechanical Keyboard community happened a couple of weeks ago. This was my first big-dog meetup since joining the community midway through ’22. I’ve been to a couple smaller meetups only starting earlier this year and got to meet some of the regulars amongst the group. Apparently I’ve done enough to get liked by the leaders and more-popular peeps in the group and they now know me by my handle when they see me; that’s how you know you’ve made it, I guess.

The venue housed close to 300 people, and everyone brought keyboard builds from all sorts of backgrounds and all different kinds of sizes/shapes/keycaps/clackyness. Among my favorites were a couple Cyberboards, a dope Bakaneko 60 housed in a wood and epoxy/resin shell, and a bunch of 65s from MODE and Qwertykeys. Me? I brought three of my builds to show off — my Space65 R3 in Storm with GMK Apollo keycaps and Badseed Tactile switches, my Mint QK75 with Clackbits linear switches, and my latest build: my Black QK80 with Cherry MX Black Clear Top linears (aka New Nixies) and GMK 8008 2 keycaps.

I’ve involved myself in many communities of the hobbies I’ve accumulated over the years, but this keyboard community is right up there with the speedcubing community with how inviting the peeps are. There’s no gatekeeping, there’s no shunning someone for lacking knowledge. If you like your mechanical keyboard, you’re in. I was unsure of how I’d be received by the more knowledgeable peeps in the group; turns out, they’re all like me. Most of them work in tech, almost all of them like tinkering, and they all like spending money in search of the perfect thing, though not necessarily knowing what that thing might be. This is a relatively expensive hobby when compared to other ones I’ve dabbled in over my adult life (I mean…who spends north of $500 on a keyboard just to display it on a wall?), but there’s a huge sense of pride in showing something off that you built. The biggest dopamine hits I was getting were from random peeps who walked by my keyboards, took a look at them, typed on the keys for a bit, and then took a picture of the setup. It’s like a car on the showroom and you’re sitting in the driver’s seat taking selfies while experiencing it. My pride tank filled up a few times over by the end of the event.

I don’t know if there’s much else to accomplish in this hobby for me. I’ve built and learned of various shapes and sizes of keyboards. I’ve learned that I like tactile switches way more than I like linears (dat bump tho), and I do think I’ve got builds that fit my personality and color favoritism. Will there be something huge and innovative in the craft over the next year in this space? Who knows? I do know that I’ve gained a new circle in my network of friends and I’ve torn another gaping hole in my wallet.