The Hummingbird keyboard retrospective

I have started using a hummingbird keyboard, here is my experience.

Day 00: Preparation and assembling

Given the pretty poor tooling I have at my disposal, and my skills which are frankly lacking, the assembly went pretty well! I feel like I have been “traumatized” (obviously not) by my previous attempts at building keyboards.

I had persuaded myself that:

It is hard, very hard
It takes a very long time
You have to suffer through the building of the keyboard to get to enjoy the keyboard

As it turns out, I had a blast soldering that keyboard! It was fun, and honestly took far less time than I anticipated!

The hardest part turned out to be choosing which firmware to flash on the keyboard and configuring it (I ended up with ZMK).

Day 01: Using it for the first time.

I have already configured my regular keyboard to use barely more keys than this one uses.
I instantly saw some problems that I would like to fix: side keys placement, thumb keys, the switches I use
I had to get accustomed to having my hands in an actually confortable position!
The size of the keyboard is super nice
I felt like it was not that much better than my regular keyboard until I actually went back to it <= Emphasize that one.
It makes me want to build my own keyboard