The build itself was the easy part, which surprised me. Switches in, plate on, a steady evening of soldering with a podcast on, and then the satisfying click of every key registering on the first test. I'd braced myself for a cold joint or a dead column and got neither. Honestly a little anticlimactic.
The real fun started after, with QMK. The hardware is just the body; the firmware is where it becomes yours. I spent far longer on the keymap than I did with the iron, and I regret none of it.
// the layer that does the actual work
[1] = LAYOUT(
KC_GRV, KC_1, KC_2, KC_3, KC_4,
MO(2), KC_HOME, KC_UP, KC_END, KC_PGUP
);
Layers are the thing nobody tells you about until you have them, and then you can't go back. A hold-for-symbols layer under the home row means my fingers barely move, and the arrow cluster lives under the right hand where it belongs rather than off in the corner. Flash it, type for a day, find the thing that annoys you, change one line, flash again. Tweaking it costs minutes, not money.
The keyboard works. But it's the firmware I keep going back to fiddle with, long after the solder cooled.