I don't like the term 'digital nomad', but I'm embracing the lifestyle to the fullest.
It's a good way to work tbh, resetting the environment is an effective way of getting into a productive headspace easily.
I mean in most of these you can even see cables!
Although workspaces seems to be designer heavy so maybe that explains it.
I get what you are saying though. It would be fun to see if they look this clean when they don't know a photographer is coming over or if you and I are just slobs.
There's room in your setup for asymmetric screens. I currently have three 24" monitors set up side by side, with a much smaller 7" screen underneath, showing Grafana dashboards. At one point, I actually had two of the 7" screens. I also briefly had a "horse blinder" style 17" monitor at the side of my setup, because I worked adjacent to the hallway and didn't like seeing people coming towards me.
Bread tabs make great cable holders. PCI slot covers make great headphone rests.
Throwing a single switch to shut the whole desk off when you're done is immensely satisfying.
In the olden days, I didn't let the two big, boxy CRT monitors on my desk run me out of space. CRTs make great tables. At one point, I strapped an FM radio, TV tuner, and a small digital clock on top of one.
- Asymmetric desk
- Shift your workspace to your non dominant hand side. This frees up space for reference material, and for writing on your dominant hand. When I previously worked on site, it was also a great place for having other engineers bring their laptop to sit next to me while we were working together.
- You can 3d print rails for a laptop so you can mount it under your desk
- You can purchase under desk mounts for large desktops. I have two computers under my desk. One gaming pc and my work macbook.
- You can also 3d print mounts for things like dacs, and amps to save even more space
- As above I switch between my work and gaming pc with a switch
- Keyboard maestro + activate application + 1 / 3 splits of windows is all you need on a decently sized monitor: 27 - 32. Being able to hit hyper key + letter to bring up or hide an application makes viewing things trivial.
- Bonus points if you map your 1/3 splits to keyboard maestro.
- Drill a hole in your desk in front of your keyboard
- You can put any wires directly into the hole vs running them uncomfortably to the edge of the desk.
- Use a split ortho linear keyboard. Push your chair in as close to the desk as possible so you don't have any breaks between your elbows and the board.
- Once a week, on Friday, make time to clean your desk. Organize it for your future self, so Monday you feel good coming to execute on work.
- Make it obvious. Put things that are habit based in front of you. You'll be surprised how much easier flossing becomes by doing this.
- Put your medication on your desk in front of you
- Put flossing material in front of youThis is no joke. After i put a bowl of floss picks (those u shaped things that are pre-strung) on my desk my dental hygenist made a surprised comment at the level of improvement in gum health.
I have only ever used a monitor the first day I got to my desk because it happened to be there.
These setups strike me a bit like AWS/GCP. Just another place for devs to spend money.
And yet another excellent engineer I know uses VIM without syntax highlighting.
I will say, a laptop is the least important computing device I own. I have one to test builds on arm64; it's on a shelf somewhere and I SSH to it. If I'm "out and about", not at my desk, then I don't want to do any computing. Meanwhile, desktops are cheaper and more upgradeable. Need more RAM? Pop a stick in. ML training too slow? Pop another GPU in. I don't know why anyone would do it any differently. (I also have 3 monitors, 2 of which are for IMs because there are so many IM apps these days. I miss the days of having IRC inside Emacs. But bought some hardware to compensate for my friends and coworkers desire to use Discord and Slack. So it goes.)
Not at all surely. Some people need that stuff and some don't. Just the luck of the draw.
I have a macbook plugged into a monitor, wireless kbd, trackpad. I use that setup about 30% of the time. The rest of the time I just use my laptop on whatever surface is near: my lap (shocker!), train or plane table, lying on the couch with the laptop on my thighs. On a plane if I have the window seat I often jam myself in at an angle and use it while twisted.
My gf thinks that is crazy: she needs an ergo mouse, special pillow on her chair, monitor at the right height etc. Her hight is a factor, also she's a parent so her carpal tunnels (and some other tendon guides) have narrowed. But she needs a neck pillow for the car as well, which I don't.
In general the physical environment is designed for people around 180 cm +/- a few. Car seats, star risers, chairs and tables... Fair or not that's how it seems to be. And luckily, I'm just a smidgen over 180.
I also have a "lectern" laptop-sized standing desk on casters, which I use for every WFH meeting, and can roll around to whatever view/lighting/backdrop/noise I want.
I sometimes miss having a desktop large landscape/portrait monitor with lots of info I can refer to spatially, with my laptop in a dock to the side for comms/dashboard monitoring. I should set up a larger desk for that again.
But a comfortable tiling window manager mitigates not having huge monitors (e.g., instantly bringing info I need into view, and managing lots of info on a small screen, without fiddling with the window management). Xmonad is still better for this for me, even though I've spent a couple years trying to get an i3wm config/practices that work as well.
A second detachable part is a keyboard stand to be used both in standing mode and in sit-down mode.
The third part is the sit-down part: a treadmill with a long chair on top, to allow stationary standing mode, slow march mode, sit-down one all in the same furniture.
So far I've just made few prototypes with scrap wood though...
And its various spinoffs (look in the sidebar).
One observation I definitely can't help but make is that everyone seems to be leaning on to a rather large/high-res single monitor than juggle around 2 WQHD/FHD displays :) I definitely had more trouble focusing when I had 2 equi-resolution screens rather than 1 large and 1 small screen OR rather 1 large screen in clamshell mode.
It's r/battlestations without the gauche RGB light strips everywhere. I give it 6 months before this is either abandoned or becomes filled with affiliate links to office furniture products.
It's slower and it's worse, but I write a fair amount of code on a laptop in hotel rooms and it works well enough. Most annoying things are probably the loss of scrolling test output on the second screen and difficulty doing multiway diff compares.