From: sylvanm@woof-box.io
To: <redacted>@woof-box.io

Many of you have been experimenting with various mechanical keyboards and switch combinations – like many in the industry – and we just need to make this official: WoofBox is now a keyboard-first company.

Over 70% of woofers use vim or emacs regularly; We’ve seen an explosion of shared macros and plugins. We think that if we can get adoption to 95% and switch teammates over to leased Ergodox Ez with Cherry MX Browns, we can realize even more enormous productivity gains. This isn’t limited to engineering! Anya from accounting is on our leaderboard at 142 WPM! Throw that mouse in the trash!

You might ask what this has to do with our mission, and while it might seem strange that we are pivoting our entire engineering strategy towards a technical means of doing things that is disconnected from the ends (“be the world’s best provider of customized dog treat packages”). That is a good question.

You might also ask why we’ve traditionally tried to hire resourceful, independent people and trust them to find the most effective way to push the business forward, but we are now focused on getting them to adopt a specific set of new technologies as fast as possible. That is also a good question.

Finally, you might ask why we’ve prided ourselves in having a vision that isn’t driven by chasing industry trends, but we are now constantly talking about how Meow Box is keyboard first, or writing up technical strategy documents after reading a blog post from Ruffle on keyboard augmented engineering. Fantastic question! Curiosity is one of our company values!

Starting today, we’ll be collecting a weekly survey of how each team is progressing on the journey to being keyboard first. See you on the leaderboard!

Movement is progress. Woof woof,

Sylvan Manos, CTO

👋 This is what passes for satire these days!