I have one month to make an MMO: but I’m on vacation 2
After the last post about occasionally doing 12+ hour work days, people have rightly wondered how I can sit for 12 hours, and have expressed concern for my derriere. The truth is: I don’t sit for 12 hours.
most programmers, I’m very proud of my setup in a sort of “this is my baby, you will look at photos and pretend you like it” kind of way. So, for this blog post I will stoke my ego a bit and tell you about my setup and why it’s come to be this way.
I think programmer setups are important. If you do this for a living, you can spend up to half of your waking hours using it. So it better be as good as it can be — I’m a believer in investing your money where you spend your time, whether that’s a chair, your mattress, screen, keyboard, mouse. If you’re going to be using these things all the time, it’s worth making sure they’re fit for purpose.
Furthermore, programmer setups aren’t built in a day. Each programmer goes through several setups, keeping the bits they like, and trying new things for the bits they don’t, gradually honing their setup to perfection. So I enjoy hearing the journey of how they ended up with the weird peripherals that they do. Here’s mine:
The chair: None
I don’t use a chair! Ok, half-kidding. I have an Ikea swivel chair: inexpensive, moderately comfortable, and I’ve added an extra mesh thingy for lumbar support. But that’s all besides the point, because I use a standing desk!
This means the chair plays only a supporting role, and I spend most of my day standing up.
I’ve worked standing up now for maybe 4 years. When I started, I could only stand for a few moments at a time before becoming tired and getting sore feet. Plus, working while standing up was distracting at first. But over the years, the muscles have built up endurance, and I can go most of the day without sitting down.
I never really believed in the health benefits of standing desks, and felt it was a weird fad that came along with avocado on toast, and walking around with coffee mugs. But at one point I had an opportunity to get one for work. Using it for a few weeks, it was terrible at first — I developed back pains, and really hated standing up, but eventually it started feeling good, really good.
What had happened was I had really bad posture, hunching over my keyboard while seated. When standing, at first, I continued to do the same, but this caused my back muscles, which were now holding me upright against that hunch, to always be straining. This is what lead to those back pains.
This turned out to be both a bad and a good thing. It was bad because it was painful, but it was good because it made me shift my posture. I realised that by leaning backwards slightly, I’d no longer be relying on those back muscles to constantly fight the hunch forward. I could keep my shoulders back, arms relaxed, and effortlessly stand upright and use the desk. To boot, the casual backwards lean and shoulders back made me look cool and confident compared to my usual hunch (or so I thought anyway).
Standing desks really fixed my posture, both while working at the computer, and in general too. And it doesn’t hurt my behind when I do marathon work days. An additional benefit is it’s really quick and minimally distracting to just walk away from the desk.
I’d recommend it for anyone. And it doesn’t have to be fancy. For a while, I used an upside down plastic box on my desk; at other times I used my kitchen counter; and once while on a trip for work, I stacked two bedside tables and used that instead.
Recently I upgraded to the pictured desk from VonHaus, which sits on top of your existing desk, and has an electric lift mechanism, meaning you can control the height, including drop it back to the desk top for seated work.
The keyboards: 🤷♀️
I use a Logitech K780. But I’m not a big fan. It’s got a keypad, but no dedicate page up/down/home/end buttons. On the balance I think I would have preferred those keys over a keypad.
The round keys I think help avoid fat-fingering two keys at once, but I’m not sure. The tablet/phone slot is very useful though, surprisingly so. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but it’s a really nice place to keep my phone when I’m at the desk. Logitech unifying wireless is decent, and works well together with the MX Anywhere mouse I used to use, but it’s less important these days using a different pointing device.
Ultimately, if I am to make an update to my setup, this keyboard would go.
But, perhaps what’s worth mentioning is that although this is a regular UK QWERTY layout keyboard, I’m using US Dvorak as my main layout in Windows.
I started using it after developing wrist pains as a teenager from using the computer too much. After some research, people were suggesting that it’s about typing posture. So I decided to re-learn my typing posture, and the easiest way to do that was to switch to a different keyboard layout. Dvorak was supposed to be more natural anyway (hint: probably not a big factor).
That helped the wrist pains. I was no longer suffering from wrist pains as much, and I switched back to QWERTY for a while. Then at some point during college, I got bored and decided to pick up Dvorak again, this time pulling the keycaps off my keyboard and rearranging them. It was slow going at first, with my typing speed taking a big hit for a long time. But over time the speed returned, and today I’m as fast as I am on Dvorak as I was on QWERTY layout.
The benefit? There are none. It’s often claimed that Dvorak is more comfortable and faster. In reality, while it is certainly more comfortable as you’re making fewer finger movements, it’s not faster. I can see how it could be less limiting if you start pushing yourself and training to type at contest speeds (I’d guess 150 wpm speeds and above). But for most people, you never approach these speeds, and so the benefits are minimal. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you happen to suffer from posture-related wrist pains like I did. But I guess the one benefit is people can’t use your computer any more because nothing they type is right.
If you look carefully at one of the photos above, you’ll see a white keyboard I use at work. That white keyboard is this one:
I use this keyboard for work. This is my trolling keyboard. It has no print on the keycaps, it’s in a non-standard “ortho” layout, and my work computer is also set to Dvorak layout. Together with a trackball instead of a mouse, my computer at work is rendered effectively unusable by anyone else unless they bring their own keyboard and mouse. I do this solely for the trolling value, the keyboard itself is pretty average to use, and the ortho layout takes some getting used to.
All my keyboards are low travel membrane keyboards. I would like to go mechanical, but they’re banned at work, and I’m concerned about it being too loud even for home use. So for now I’m in no rush to try, but will probably start looking into it in the future.
I hope you've enjoyed my weird menagerie of stuff on my desk. I'll take a break here and talk about the rest of my setup in a couple days. Tomorrow I'll stop boring you with photos and stories and talk about a slightly more technical topic
