A working record. What got built, what broke, and what turned out to be true.
Spent the day taking Key-J apart. It had shipped, it was live, and it was close to unusable, which I already knew and had said out loud.
The count of things wrong with it is the part worth writing down. Selecting Vibrato killed the app, because one line starting an oscillator was duplicated and the exception left every key pressed under it permanently dead. Export produced one audible second out of thirty-five, because the session held every note typed before Record at time zero and normalisation then scaled the rest into silence. Release was declared in seconds where everything reading it expected milliseconds, so notes clicked off until you touched the slider, and every tone preset quietly undid it again. Notes were plotted five staff positions too high, so the whole top octave was drawn off the top of the picture. And global capture — the entire reason a desktop build exists — had never once played the right note: the keycode table was written in macOS codes for a library that emits its own, and of twenty-four letter mappings, zero were correct.
Most of those came from the same place. The browser build and the desktop build were two separate implementations of the same product, so a fix to one never touched the other and nobody noticed the drift. There is one renderer now, and the desktop copy is generated from it with a check that fails the build if they diverge.
Then it went out: installers for Windows and Linux, pip install keyj on PyPI, and a winget manifest submitted. Two things nearly went out wrong. The Windows app identifier was still a personal handle from before any of this was a company, which Windows writes into the uninstall registry and which every future installer has to match — changed with an hour to spare and no downloads on the clock. And installing silently over a running copy exited zero while leaving half the old version on disk, which is precisely what a package manager does by default.
The thing I keep circling is that I measured everything I could measure and missed what anyone sees first. The app shipped through four versions with the default Electron icon, and PlumHUD has been looking for its logo down a relative path since the day it was released, so the plum has never once appeared. Both are fixed. Neither was hard. They were just never checked, because checking them was nobody's idea of rigour.
Key-J is proprietary from 1.6.0. MIT was never a decision I made; it was inherited from the top of the repository and then copied outward. The source stays readable, because a program that installs a global keyboard hook should be auditable by whoever runs it. Readable and free to resell are different things, and now the licence says which one this is.
Filed the LLC, though not under the name I wanted. An unrelated F Key LLC has been active in Florida since 2021, which meant F-Keys LLC wasn't distinguishable on the record and July's filing was refused. Re-filed as F-Keys Creative LLC at no cost.
Spent a while convinced this meant redoing a month of branding, before working out that a registered entity name and a trading name are separate things. The brand is unchanged. The filing cabinet just has a longer label on it.
The snapshot ran on its own for the first time overnight — 464 package installs for the week, up seven from the day before.
Built a daily snapshot, because the numbers were arriving in six places I never looked at. The first run reported 457 package installs a week across six packages, and 35 papers with 859 views and 359 downloads. I would have guessed lower on every one of those. @f-keys/tip-widget on its own is 289 a week, which is 289 more than I thought it was.
Swept the dissolved company name out of everything a person reads — 65 occurrences across twelve files. Most of it was cosmetic. Two things were not. FunDoge's terms and privacy pages still named the dissolved entity as the data controller, the IP owner, the party shielded by the limitation of liability, and the indemnitee. A liability clause protecting a company that no longer exists protects nobody. And WikiPolish was stamping a dead domain into the edit summary of every Wikipedia edit made through it, which would have written it into a permanent public record every time the tool worked. Checked the account history first — it had never actually fired. Caught it before it wrote anything.
Found two forgotten repositories still publishing the retired version of DogeFundMe, both displaying live wallet addresses and asking people to send to them. Turned their pages off.
Put a check into CI so the old name can't quietly return. It removes the allowed identifiers from a line first and only then looks for the brand word, because the GitHub org and a classifier named in a published paper both have to survive. A blanket find-and-replace would have broken working links on eight pages.
Rebuilt f-keys.com. The old page was one undifferentiated grid, and the version before it, on the old domain, had 23 cards of which 17 pointed at nothing. It's six sections now — apps, games, tools, hardware, research, properties — and every card carries a status badge, so something in alpha can be visible and honest at the same time rather than hidden or oversold.
Recovering Key-J turned into a rescue. Its Electron entry point was gone from the working folder and survived in exactly one zip, inside a directory named "zip to sort". The entire desktop app depended on that file. It lives in a repository now, along with the browser build.
Pointed the old company domain at f-keys.com. One redirect, no DNS records touched, email left intact.