[yowayb]

One of the finest engineers I’ve worked with has macular degeneration. His entire setup was designed to allow him to focus on the same part of his laptop screen (with a very large font), which is basically eye-level screen.

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.

[jrockway]

I think the money is well spent. Like, I wouldn't buy a color monitor just to get syntax highlighting, but there are no non-color monitors, so sure, I'll use syntax highlighting. (I use Emacs over an SSH session. Got italic text working a few months ago and I love it!) The rest of the things people have seem important to me; bad input devices will make your hands unusable, and you probably can't do your job after that happens, so if you sink $400 on a keyboard to be able to do your job in 10 years, that's not really a waste. Spending money on microphones and cameras means less or no money spent on commuting, because people can actually get work done over Zoom. A desk is mandatory for overcoming the force of gravity as it applies to your keyboard or laptop.

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.)

[poushkar]

Thanks for sharing this! It's been only a few posts so far since I started the blog, but I am actually looking for persons first, and the "coolness" of a setup doesn't really matter to me. In fact, I find a laptop that moves between sofa and a kitchen table as inspiring as some intricate setups. There is something about doing more with less. And I am sure there will be people with such setups featured on the blog, as well.