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

I’m Ben Swift—I’m an academic computer scientist and cybernetician for my day job, and a guitarist, soccer player, and dad of three outside of work.

What hardware do you use?

My main driver is an M1 MacBook Pro which is a couple of years old, but still does the job fine. I also remotely bounce around several different local and cloud dev boxes as part of my AI software development work, which are usually running some flavour of Linux. Honestly, as long as it has a nice display and can run full-screen Emacs I’m happy.

When I’m at my (standing) desk I hook it up to an Apple Studio Display monitor. I prefer to have one really nice (and big-ish, but not crazy) screen, and then to run apps fullscreen wherever I can. If I have too much other stuff in my field of view I get distracted.

For audio I have a Shure SM7B on a short mic stand, which sits nicely between the left and right halves of my keyboard (and I can still see the screen over the top). It’s way overkill for Zoom calls, but it’s a good conversation-starter.

And what software?

Like I said, I do as much as possible in Emacs. I’m a Lisper, and it just fits my brain. Looking back through my dotfiles, they’re now almost 20 years old, and my journey has been Aquamacs (briefly) -> Vanilla GNU -> Spacemacs -> Doom. I do often consider declaring Emacs bankruptcy and starting again with a slim, vanilla-ish config (although obviously with evil and other mod cons I now can’t live without) but the Doom folks do a pretty good job of that anyway, and I try not to yak-shave too much these days.

I manage all my programming languages & tools with Homebrew. I work with multiple different languages & tools week to week, depending on the project I’m working on. I’ve been loving the Elixir/Phoenix combo for full stack interactive web stuff recently, but honestly, I just try and use the best tool for the job.

Outside of that, most of the software I use is web-based. Again, I like to keep things OS-agnostic when I can because I do have to jump around a bit, and I’d rather not get locked in if I can help it.

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

For a long time I used a Keyboardio Atreus, which I really liked. I like to work in cafes as well as at my desk, so a portable mechanical keyboard is a high priority for me. However, about three years ago I switched to a ZSA Moonlander with a custom keymap based on the Atreus Layout. I could still deal with an Atreus number of keys, but the ability to split the hands is much more comfortable.

What would be your dream setup?

Something like I have right now is pretty close. I wouldn’t mind a slightly larger (e.g. 32”) main display, but only if it was at the same dpi as my current display. And obviously I could always use a laptop that would be faster/lighter/longer battery, but honestly these Apple silicon MBPs are pretty good, so I don’t have much to complain about right now.