Why am I not a 10X VC-Backed Full-Stack God-King?

Published: Mar 5, 2025

I’m not on a lengthy train ride right now — which is when I’d usually have bouts of long-term introspection — but I just spent the better part of a day trying to debug a problem:

  • Peeking at the GH60 pcb schematic to find if the JTAG pins for the microcontroller are exposed (Hurrah for open hardware).
  • Trying to figure out a method of adding accessible traces to these 6 pins without disassembling my entire keyboard.
  • Triply checking that my makeshift wiring was actually connected
  • Realizing that this is an AVR chip and not an ARM chip so I’ve been running the wrong gdb this whole time.
  • Discovering that my Black Magic Probe actually doesn’t support not-ARM chips
  • Wiring the pins to their relevant GPIO pins on a Raspberry pi so I can program using that
  • Finding out that I have to drop the voltage on some RESET pin to make JTAG work (😅 Sorry I don’t work with hardware)
  • Searching the pcb schematic again for these fancy MISO, MOSI ports that everyone actually uses for flashing AVR chips.
  • More makeshift wiring fuckery
  • Flashing via avrdude

All this makes me feel like… I’m solving small problems. Optimally, if I want to save the world, I should be focusing on large problems. These large problems will inevitably consist of a series of small problems, but currently the issues I’m dealing with aren’t contributing to solving any “large problem”.

How am I suppose to be a 10X techbro developer if I’m curious about the underlying issue of my keyboards? It wasn’t the switches. It wasn’t the traces connecting the mcu to the board. Is it really the mcu itself?

[[Place irrelevant image here]]

My hustle propaganda podcasts that I listen to keep telling me that I’m suppose to have passion. That there should be something that consumes my thoughts — something that I think about in bed. But I never have. I’m neither depressed or unhappy as far as I can tell, actually I think I’m quite the opposite. In nerd speak, I guess I could say the graph of things to happiness has a high mean and low standard deviation?

Anyways, ayo, check it out. My GH60 from ~10 years ago is now USB type-C and supports configuration through VIA (meaning I can live reconfigure keys through a web browser without going through some debug mode). Unfortunately, it also turns out I no longer like Cherry MX Clears and this keyboard does NOT have hot swappable switches.