The Keyboard Site I've Been Building on the Side

Hey everyone, Romel here. I've been wanting to build this thing for over a year now, and I'm finally making some slow but real progress on it: a little site for keeping track of keyboards.

If you've followed any of my keyboard content, you know the collection has gotten a bit out of hand. Different boards, different switches, keycap sets I've swapped around more times than I can remember. I wanted one place to log all of it. What's in each build, what switches are in it right now, what I've tried, and what I thought of it. Part collection tracker, part build journal.

The fun part is that it's also an excuse to build something for myself instead of for work. I reached for Prisma as the ORM, which made modeling the whole thing painless. A keyboard has switches, switches have specs, a build links a board to a set of parts. Once the schema is right, the types flow out from there and the rest of the app mostly writes itself. That's the part I always underestimate: get the data model clean and everything downstream gets easier.

I'll also admit ChatGPT has been carrying some of the load. Not writing the app for me, but unblocking me when I hit something I'd normally lose an evening to. A weird Prisma migration, a query I couldn't get right, the boilerplate I didn't feel like typing. As a solo dev working on this in the cracks of the week, having something to rubber-duck with has made it a lot easier to keep momentum.

It's nowhere near done, and honestly it might stay an audience-of-one project forever. But that's kind of the point. The cost of poking at it for an hour after work is low enough that I actually keep coming back to it.

If you've built something similar, or you just want to yell at me about my switch choices, drop it in the comments or find me on Discord.