Marcin Wichary

2 February 2015 / 1,800 words

Originally published in Medium Engineering

One keyboard bug three decades in the making

A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium:

“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

Ingredient 1/4:

Polish language

Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian.…