Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

My name is Alex. I’m originally from Portland, Oregon in the United States. I’m 37 (no way I’m that old! ugh) and married. I’ve got two German Shorthaired Pointers and currently live in Berlin working as the team lead and lead data engineer for SmartBroker+. I’m on Threads (R.I.P. Twitter) @alex.narayan and Mastodon as @gigatexal.

I enjoy walking. I enjoy taking walks with my wife and my dogs and just walking the relatively flat city of Berlin. I don’t read much, except for work. I do like binging good TV; currently I’m in the second season of Halo from Paramount+. Other than that (man, this really sounds like a dating profile, which I’ve not had to care about for almost eight years now), I just like enjoying time tinkering with computers and hacking away at my Linux workstation and talking tech with friends.

What hardware do you use?

Though it’s a bit out of date: Fedora’s been upgraded to Fedora 39, and I’ve swapped the Nvidia hardware out for an AMD 6800 non-XT GPU. This setup works beautifully with Wayland.

I have a Dell 3221QS, which I thought was a steal for 400 euros some three years or so ago—so much so that I started a YouTube channel about it. And my newest and most prized monitor is the LG 28MQ780—a square beast you can see on the left in the photos.

Of course I rock a ZSA Moonlander, as you can see in the photos. One day I was fed up with my beloved but uninteresting mechanical keyboard I bought on Amazon. It’s nice but boring, and my wrists and hands were starting to hurt. So, on a whim, and needing a bit of retail therapy, I made a purchase for a ZSA Moonlander on the website and then told the other keyboard nerds in my company’s Slack all about it. The chat was pretty split between custom, from-scratch keyboard hackers, the Kinesis Advantage360 crowd (which I did end up buying locally from a retailer because waiting for the Moonlander was taking forever, trying it out for a few hours, and then promptly returning it, as it was just too far a jump for me to make), and the ZSA Moonlander folks. We geeked out about keyboards in that channel for some 100s of replies. And then I waited and waited and waited. Eventually we found the right ritual animal sacrifice and keywords to utter to get DHL/German customs to release the keyboard to me and for me to pay them and get my keyboard.

And what software?

I use Fedora 39, LunarVim (a framework that turns Neovim into a really nice VSCode replacement), Sway (i3-like tiling window manager for Linux, but for Wayland), and i3 when using X11 (window/screen sharing is just so much easier but then I have to live with tearing … it’s a whole thing), and I mostly use Git, SQL, Python, and Google’s BigQuery at work.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

It’s a pretty stock setup. I got the metal base as an accessory and a few more feet. Other than that, it’s pretty clickety—can’t remember what keys I got—but it’s definitely not safe for work. It’s far too loud. I like it that way. I love the key travel and how if the elbow rests on my Steelcase chair are at the right level, my wrists feel like they’re floating, and I just dance on the keys.

Using a tiling window manager means I hardly ever use the mouse. Even Chrome and Firefox have the Vim plugin installed so I can filter through webpages using key bindings from my favorite editor.

My keyboard setup isn’t fancy. I am still very much learning. I use maybe 10% of the smarts of this keyboard, so it’ll only get cooler the more I learn. I just got to a point where I’m productive and then stopped hacking on the configs.

What would be your dream setup?

It’d be Ben Chatelain’s setup. I used to be a huge Mac guy, and my next laptop will probably be a M-series one. All that screen real estate and double the RAM of my workstation! I’m very jealous. Simply wow.