I recently bought the NocFree lite wireless split keyboard. I’ve been using the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard before, which is no split keyboard, but it already is slightly angled, so that my hands learned to not reach to the other side. Therefore moving to a fully split keyboard has been quite smooth.

But since NocFree doesn’t offer a version with international or German layout, it also means I have to unlearn typing with the German layout. Since I still write quite a lot of German, I also still needed a way to write German Umlaute äöü despite using an English layout.

With a bit of research I found the EurKey layout, which seems to be perfect. It keeps all the keys from the US layout, but adds European characters hitting right Alt + [key] combinations. ä for example is typing right alt + a.

If you want to give EurKey a try, I’ve installed this version 1.4 on my MacBook.

Great post highlighting the problems of depending on ChatBots to do your programming work:

Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.

And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.

If that happens? If the last real programmers are drowned in a sea of button-clicking career-chasers - then I pity the smart outsider kids to come after me.

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.