Hello, I'm Dénes - better known as MrZealot in online communities.

I'm a software engineer and researcher at the University of Szeged where I've earned my PhD in software quality metrics. As a little graduation present for myself, I've decided to finally splurge on my first mechanical keyboard in 2018. This, in retrospect, was a pretty big mistake.

I fell down deep into the rabbit hole, and ended up building my own fully custom board, the Absolem within the year. I even documented the whole process, and my quite literal "zeal" started to draw like-minded fanatics to join a fledgling club server. What initially surprised me, but seems obvious in hindsight, though, was how far fewer of these folks were interested in the Absolem as-is, and how far more of them treated it as just another evolutionary step towards something even more custom.

Turns out, the biggest contribution I could offer to the community was not my board itself (as in, yet another "one board to rule them all"), and not even the steps of how I got to it, but rather a way to make it easier for people to design their own boards. Luckily, the design for the Absolem was mostly generative and parametric already, so I began morphing it into a general purpose declarative keyboard generator called Ergogen.

Fast forward 3 years: Ergogen is now at its 4th major release, it's used by hundreds of creators, and it's at least partially responsible for the existence of many custom ergonomic keyboards. Not to mention its official Discord, which turned into one of the most helpful and innovative DIY communities I've ever seen. All this positivity seeded by a silly side project - enough to make a grown man cry.

In an ideal world, Universal Basic Income would cover my needs and I could just develop Ergogen instead of work stuff if I so chose. Until we get to such a world, though, GitHub sponsorship would help me support myself with fewer external commitments - so that I can focus more of my time and energy on new features, bugfixes, proper documentation, guides, tutorials, and the ever-so-sexy task of repo maintenance. So if you find my "work" useful, please consider a small monthly donation so I can afford doing more of it! 🙏