Max Burger

Max, based in California, trained as an industrial designer and now writes software for a living, but keyboards are the hobby that stuck. It started with a Choc Planck and a simple problem: he couldn't find keycaps he actually liked for it. Back then the options were thin, flat ABS caps, cheap and not much fun to type on. Max reckoned he could do better.

So he designed his own. We came across his work through a Reddit post, got talking, and decided to run an interest check together. It took off, and that IC, run in the strange quiet of the COVID lockdowns, is the project that started FKcaps. MBK has been our flagship ever since, and the de-facto standard for ergo Choc builds.

Max is about as easy-going as collaborators come, and the design training shows. When we were finding our feet, his help on the 3D side was invaluable, the difference between a promising sketch and a keycap we could actually mold and ship.

He hasn't stopped building. In 2026 he published SMK, an open-source keyboard firmware written in Swift, which is Max in a nutshell: find something he loves, dig in, and craft a better version for everyone to use.