Our calicos look so similar!
yeanomaybe
joined 1 year ago
There's a spectrum of DIY to it. Boards with an integrated MCU may only require that you solder switches. Switch soldering is quite forgiving and I'd say pretty fun. There are some people who hate soldering but still like custom boards, so they will use a soldering service (unfortunately, usually found via word of mouth or places like mechmarket). If you wanted a cheap kit with lots of soldering and you're in the EU, I'd look at https://42keebs.eu/products/kits/
They have a couple of splits available. A lot depends also on how many keys you're looking to have. The wonderful world of layers and combos has a learning curve but there's plenty of programmers who use very small boards on a daily basis. ZMK might be fun for you if you do coding on the side as well as for work.
Feel free to send a DM if you have specific questions, I'm getting a bit long here.
Not sure of your budget or thoughts on some DIY. If you don't have the time to game, you might not have time to solder... In that case I'd recommend looking at options from Kinesis: https://kinesis-ergo.com/products/#keyboards
You can also look through here (https://golem.hu/boards/) for some diy options if you'd prefer that route. Kukkurovaca had a much more detailed explanation. (Hi Kukkurovaca, cool to see you here instead of on discord!)
Thank you for putting this up and keeping it up, I know it is a lot of hard work.