Created originally as an April Fool’s Day Joke, the Stack Overflow prank keyboard actually turned out to be a pretty great product idea! Turns out, roughly one-fourth of Stack Overflow’s 15 million developers/users even tries to copy and paste code within five minutes of visiting the site… so Stack Overflow decided to promote a ‘fake product’ as an April Fool’s joke, hardly anticipating that it would end up becoming such a crowd favorite! The now-released tiny keyboard gives you instant shortcuts like copying and pasting right under your fingertips, allowing developers to streamline their work and reduce time spent typing or scanning through code.
Some say a programmer’s best solution is a simple two-step process: copy and paste – two things the Stack Overflow ‘The Key’ was designed to practically excel at! The tiny USB-C peripheral sits right beside your keyboard, giving you access to simple commands with the press of a mere button. The 3-key device lets you instantly open Stack Overflow and copy + paste lines of code, practically halving your work time so you can zip through projects. Fully programmable, these three keys can do much more than copy and paste. In fact, you can configure them to perform virtually any key command you want, making them useful to not just developers but to all kinds of creatives.
The keyboard’s design is courtesy of avid-coder Cassidy, who was especially blown away by how simple and useful the product idea was. Cassidy worked closely with the folks at Stack Overflow to develop the product to perfection. Each ‘The Key’ macropad comes with Kailh Box Black switches for a smooth clicking experience and features swappable keycaps, allowing you to customize your little peripheral with keycaps of your own. The entire apparatus sits within a slick black, CNC-machined aluminum case, with rubberized feet to make sure the keyboard doesn’t slip around while you hit the keys. ‘The Key’ connects to devices via USB-C, using a coiled cable that ships along with the little gadget.
‘The Key’ is available for pre-order exclusively on Drop for $29. A portion of the proceeds from sales will go to digitalundivided to support their cause to catalyze economic growth in Black and Latinx communities.
Designers: Cassidy and Drop (in collaboration with Stack Overflow)
