Programming luminary Jeff Atwood designs his ultimate coding keyboard

There’s no shortage of keyboard designs out there appealing to everyone from the gamer to the aesthete, but coders and writers are a particularly picky lot. Just ask Jeff Atwood, the creator of and developer behind Stack Overflow and Coding Horror. In his quest to find the ideal backlit, mechanical instrument for building blog posts and web apps, Atwood decided to take matters into his own hands, collaborating with WASD to produce the CODE Keyboard.

Named after Charles Petzold’s seminal book on the structure of computers and the language that talks to them, Atwood says his keyboard is “the only simple, clean, beautiful backlit keyboard” he’s ever found. WASD says that the keys are quiet and un-clicky, although they do have a “distinct tactile bump.” You can also switch between Windows, Mac, Dvorak, and Colemak arrangements at a hardware level thanks to a switch under the keyboard, and there are media shortcuts built in, so holding the Fn key turns Insert into Play / Pause, for example. The keyboard sells for $149.99 in 87- and 104-key varieties, but it’s backordered until September 16th.