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

If you were to ask my wife, she will tell you that I am a romantic. Others may suggest “curmudgeon” as a better adjective, but for her, to leave your old country behind and spend fourteen years working to become an American citizen, for love, is romantic.

To earn a crust, I work as a customer enterprise architect for kyndryl. Born out of IBM, we design, build, manage, and modernize the world’s critical technology systems. My role is to listen to our clients and help them solve their next challenge. Whether that is moving from a legacy data centre into the cloud, tackling the hidden costs of dark data, or responsibly embracing the pervasive explosion of generative AI, I’ll qualify the undertaking and collaborate with our teams to deliver a solution that delights our client.

I can often be found in the kitchen when not in the office. England, where I am originally from, has a strong tradition in butchery, and I regularly make my own sausage and cure my own bacon.

For Christmas this year, I put a chicken inside of a duck, which in turn fitted neatly into a turkey, to make what is commonly referred to as a turducken. It was a great success, and we all gathered around the carving table to witness the cross-section. It is a lot of meat, however, and we worked on the leftovers for weeks!

I’m also a keen diarist, having kept one since I was seven years of age. I prefer to use pen and paper and find the process calming and cathartic. It is also a great way to relax, reflect, and get away from the computer.

I think one of my first entries when I was seven ran something like “Today, Mummy cut my toenails.” These days, whilst I’m no Samuel Pepys, I would like to think I have progressed to something slightly more literary.

When opportunity presents itself, my wife and I are also keen travellers, and we like to explore the US as much as we can. Of course, coming from a very small country such as England, it is still sometimes hard for me to understand the sheer scale of the US or my own state of Texas, which, if the internet is to be believed, is four and a half times the size of Great Britain. The British consider a long drive to be three hours, whereas here, in America, that is just a quick trip to the shops! Consequently, as neither my wife nor I enjoy flying, we’ve learned to appreciate the joys of the Lone Star State more acutely.

What hardware do you use?

I am a contracted home worker. For ten years, I have worked at a plastic-and-metal trestle table and a fifty-dollar Walmart chair that I had inherited from my father-in-law. Did this contribute to the poor posture I’d inherited from a life of deskbound jobs? Perhaps, but a couple of years ago, my body finally said “enough!” and two of my cervical disks ruptured! To anyone suffering from back pain, know that I feel your pain. I spent four months flat on my back, working with my laptop perched on my chest. Since then, sexy CPUs have taken a back seat to ergonomics, comfort, and health, which have taken centre stage.

Kyndryl was very supportive during this time and arranged to install an Uplift Standing Desk (80” x 30”) with a Big Ultra-Thin Keyboard Tray and a MoonTower Six Arm Monitor Stand, which mounts six monitors.

Three of the monitors are 28 inches, one is 24 inches, and two are 21 inches. They are all pretty cheap and nothing to speak of except for the Apple Thunderbolt Display, which I bought secondhand from a friend for $400. At the time he wasn’t using it, which was a travesty. Of course, nobody can work on just six monitors these days, so I also have three Crestview Single Monitor Arms, two of which have the laptop mount attached to hold a MacBook Pro M1 and an iPad Pro, and the last one has another 24” Dell monitor, just for good measure.

Typically, I stand at the desk when I am in meetings, but when I sit, I do so in a Herman Miller Aeron ergonomic chair, which was one of the few chairs available in something other than a one-size-fits-all. As someone with a bit of heft to them, I was pleased to find that this chair comes in three sizes, the largest of which accommodates my substance with grace and aplomb. The armrests are particularly notable for their adjustability and allow me to lean back whilst my hands are presented to the Voyager in a “Kirk-esque” fashion.

In this way, my neck is always coddled, as I can stand if I need to, sit when I want, and, because of a nifty little foot hammock attached to the underside of the desk, I can work almost horizontally! Everything works in combination to deliver a superior level of comfort, but the Voyager is a keystone component. Without it, I couldn’t open my chest, allowing my arms to rest by my sides so they are always supported, taking most of the strain from my trapezoidal muscles so I don’t hunch and instead, relax.

The Voyager, tented on two Manfrotto Pocket Tripods, surrounds an Apple Magic Trackpad and an Kensington Expert Trackball Mouse. Having tried all manner of pointing devices, I’ve learned only trackballs seem to cope with multiple monitors. Casting the mouse pointer onto a faraway screen with a quick flick of the finger as opposed to the endless scraping of mouse over mousepad is liberating. The trackpad was donated by a friend, and I use it exclusively for two-finger swiping to navigate large canvases such as architecture diagrams or vast datasets in a spreadsheet.

External storage is predominantly delivered by a Cenmate 8 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure and OpenZFS, which delivers the RAID5 missing from native macOS.

RAID is not backup, so I have a variety of naked spinning disks ripped out of various defunct machines providing my backup infrastructure and an assortment of old machines repurposed to run Linux (SUSE & Mint) acting as bastions, firewalls, and project machines.

Most of my audio is delivered through some Apple AirPods Max, which despite being rather heavy and needing to be stashed in the freezer on occasion to restore the Bluetooth connection, work well. If I do need to rock out the show, I have some Logitech speakers that are fifteen years old if they are a day, but they can still belt out the music with a level of fidelity beyond my old ears’ ability to detect any flaw.

I know I said that sexy CPUs rather take a back seat these days; however, I do run an Apple Mac Studio Ultra (M1), which cost a small fortune. For the life of me, I can’t get it above 20% CPU utilisation.

It shone too brightly when it was first launched, and the money leapt right out of my pocket before I had time to realise what I was doing. Without looking too hard, you’ll find a moral here.

To address the elephant in the room: Are nine monitors too many?

A question each person must answer for themselves. What I will say is that running this amount of screen real estate takes time; the transition took several years. Why I have so many screens stems from a role in operations and a philosophy of processing as much information as possible. Today, I’m an architect, but for many years, I was in operations supporting multiple customers. Consequently, I would have tmux sessions, Remote Desktop connections, SQL Server Management Studio, and Oracle SQL Developer connecting me to several databases, incident management, and monitoring dashboards all open and requiring my regular attention. I needed to see emails and instant messages so that customers, teammates, and bosses had their needs met and most important of all, my calendar, where I could track my time and make sure I wasn’t late for the fifty million meetings we are all inevitably invited to.

My strategy, therefore, was, rather than continually poll through multiple, overlapping windows, to instead have every application visible at all times. Sometimes, in the case of email and calendar, that means one-app-one-screen, and sometimes two applications could coexist on the same monitor, side by side. Then, all the information was there, where I could see it.

When I added a fourth screen, I realised that this approach was naive. My brain hurt. I couldn’t take it in! Three screens, not a problem, but the fourth? I needed to ease into it. I had to practice widening my perception to read the extra data through my peripheral vision. It took about three months to become proficient, and each new monitor thereafter required a settling-in period whilst my brain grew to accommodate it.

Originally, I had all the monitors connected to a single device leveraging DisplayLink Hubs to deal with the fact that most desktops can’t support so many screens. Now, I have them split between my work laptop, which supports two monitors, and my personal machine, which supports five, natively, and I can switch between the two using a KVM.

And what software?

With nine screens, window management is critical. Were I looking for a solution today, I might choose Raycast, as besides window management, it offers powerful automation in a low-code package, but when I was first looking for a solution, I found Hammerspoon, and it is too deeply integrated into my workflow for me to change now.

Hammerspoon allows you to write lua code that interacts with macOS APIs to control almost any aspect of the operating system. I use it for window management and have functions that control how each application lays out on each screen. In this way I can arrange my windows with a single key press, and this really unlocks the power of the Voyager and layers. I have functions that can resize individual windows or move them from one screen to another, say from the very bottom left to the very top right, in a single action. Other functions move applications to halves or quadrants of the screen. Tying what are about 37 window management functions to individual keys gives me ultimate control over my screen real estate without having to leave the keyboard.

I have moved away from VS Code to Neovim and have evolved from markdown to asciidoc, replacing any need for MS Word. Firefox and Safari are my two main browsers, that with the Vimium and Vimari extensions enable Vim motions so that I no longer need to use my mouse. I’m also playing around with Shortcat, which is like Vimari on steroids and brings the same Vim-like motions to all my other applications.

I’ve really come to appreciate declarative tools such as Ansible and Terraform that allow you to define the world as code, so Homebrew, which allows me to define my software packages in a Brewfile, has made maintaining my software configurations much faster and simpler; particularly useful when reinstalling software onto a new or recovered machine.

Coming from the days of green screens and the CP/M operating system, I’ve always had a terminal open on my screen and do a lot of my day-to-day from it—I’m writing this in asciidoc through Neovim, right now! With the introduction of more modern command-line tools, I have found fzf, zoxide, bat, and Yazi can really up your terminal game. An excellent fuzzy finder, fzf will massively speed up your file navigation and modernise your command history with an easy-to-use TUI. Zoxide supercharges cd so you can jump to your most commonly used directories with just a few keystrokes. Yazi is a command-line file manager. I don’t use it much, but it does image preview in a terminal, so …

I’m not a ricer, I don’t need my terminal to do a lot, so I’ve moved to Ghostty, a new terminal emulator which works straight out of the box. Starship gives me a little terminal beautification, and tmux provides my session management.

The Mac’s file manager needs work—it’s the one thing I prefer on Windows—therefore, I use a third-party replacement called Path Finder. This is the Swiss Army knife of file management, and I’m sure I use only a fraction of its capabilities. Its compelling feature is that you can have a split window and drag and drop files between two locations much more simply than in the native app.

Writing the same bits of text over and over, whether it’s my email address, a code header, or my latest use case—generative AI prompts—gets old! Textexpander is a snippet manager that allows me to store all my commonly used text in a database which I can access by typing a shortcut like ;date for today’s date or ;adoc to add my favourite asciidoc document attributes to the beginning of a new document. I use it all the time; it saves me hours, I’m sure.

Brainstorming and note-taking cannot be done better, in my opinion, than by using a mind map. For over fifteen years, I’ve been using MindManager. It’s very keyboard-centric, making it an excellent tool for taking real-time meeting notes. You can also jazz those notes up to quickly become a presentation, and it has some wickedly powerful project management chops which can model agile as well as traditional, more Gantt-style approaches. Great for people who have to straddle a kanban board for the software development teams but still need a succinct, one-page view for the executive.

When I’m working with databases, I am working with three apps. DBeaver is a great, open-source database IDE that can interface with almost any flavour of database when you need to dig in and look at the data structures. Azure Data Studio makes for a lightweight tool to run your queries against, do your SQL development, and—if you are using MS SQL Server—run a nifty Database-as-Code pipeline. You can also load the VS Code Vim extension that brings Vim Motions to the editor (although I still tend to use Neovim for most of the code composition).

And of course, whilst I try to keep away from it as much as possible, you can’t work in a corporation without coming up against Microsoft Office, but even with the Voyager and Hammerspoon, I don’t seem to make the MS Office experience any faster!

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

I have a pretty customised layout. I like to use the custom RGB settings to colour each layer differently and to also group keys that have similar functions to the same colour. In this way, if I need to ever glance down, I get a subtle hint to what I should be looking for.

I’ve recently retired the numbers row for everyday typing and am working hard to ensure none of my fingers need to move more than one key position from the home row. To achieve this, I have three main layers which I use continually just to type.

Layer 0: Main Layer

This is the alphanumeric layer and is pretty stock. I’ve moved Shift, Return, Space, and Delete to the thumb clusters, and this is also where most of my momentary layer switches go for the long hold so that it’s easy to hit any key with my other fingers when on another layer.

I’m not a fan of adding additional functionality like home row mods to this layer because the Mac has a really cool feature where if you hold down a key, you get a list of all the diacritics for that letter. For example, if you wish to write an “è,” you simply hold down the e key, and a little menu pops up, and you can select è by pressing 1. I use that quite a bit, and putting a hold function on any of those keys screws that up.

As I’ve retired the numbers row, I’ve got a few more keys to play with. I am starting to add less-used functions to these keys and have just added app screen assignments to the left-hand top row.

Layer 1: Symbols & Numbers

I have moved all my symbols to a dedicated layer to bring them closer to the home position. Even after almost a year, I am still learning my Voyager layout, and one of my luxuries is having a single screen dedicated to the Keymapp application. There, I can glance quickly if I’ve momentarily forgotten where I’ve put a symbol. And the heatmap feature, which tracks your key presses showing your most commonly used keys, helped me make sure that my most commonly used characters are on my home rows and under my index fingers. I’ve also laid out my brackets on either side of my left index finger so that they are easily accessible but at the same time don’t get in the way of my power fingers.

My keypad, which is on the right, is slightly unconventional, with 1 under my middle finger so that I could keep my popular symbols under my index. It’s been a hard slog to train myself that finger two = 1, but practice makes perfect, and I need more practice.

Layer 2: Navigation

This could easily be called the Hammerspoon layer because, as I’ve said, I use it to help navigate and position all my applications. The navigation layer is where I configure all the key combos that Hammerspoon is listening for; mostly hypers.

The exception to this is that I’ve recently moved the Escape key to my left index finger, one above the home row. Since I’ve moved to Neovim, I hit the Escape like a demented telegraph operator, so I had to bring it in from the cold, and now everyone is much happier.

I’ve then got some lesser-used layers.

Layer 3: Keyboard Controls

This is almost stock, and I hardly ever use it. I have custom RGB setups so don’t use the built-in sequences, pretty as they are. I have added a screen capture key and volume controls here and use them, but rarely.

Layers 4 & 5: One-Handed Operations

One of the few drawbacks of using a split keyboard is that it is very difficult to use one-handed, say when you have a sandwich in the other hand. Now, I know it probably goes against the laws of etiquette to eat your lunch whilst working at your computer, but I have to admit my guilt to this uncouth practice and quickly discovered I’d have to create some new layers if I was going to continue my indelicate behaviour. So, I use layers four and five to flip the QWERTY layout between the boards. In this way, with a single, layer key, either board can deliver all the letters and numbers to either hand, no matter where your sandwich is.

This is where I am at today, and it seems to work well. Tomorrow, it could be totally different.

I love the Voyager. I spend a third of my life in front of a computer, and my keyboard is the tool by which I do my job. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the Voyager has changed my life. What is unexpected is that outside of the health benefits, it’s made my cyber-life fun again. Workflow is no longer a bottleneck so long as I have the imagination to solve for it.

What would be your dream setup?

I already have it.