Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Dana and I would have to say I do many things, some better than others! For work I am a Data Engineer @ Shopify, currently focused on data discovery and exploration application. In a previous life I worked on the Data Infrastructure team maintaining and scaling the data analytics platform here at Shopify. Needless to say, a good portion of my work life is spent in front of a keyboard typing out Python, Ruby, or nowadays even a little TypeScript.

What hardware do you use?

This may be a bit embarrassing: I don’t tend to stress over my hardware setup. I tend to work, ahem, “in the cloud” . Currently I am running a 2017 15” MacBook Pro with 16Gb of memory lovingly lent to me by my employer. Usually I run docked to a 27” LG display. For a keyboard, as if you needed to ask, I use a white ErgoDox EZ with MX Clears as my daily driver. Also trying out a WhiteFox that I purchased and forgot about many months ago. After using an ergonomic keyboard I find it hard to go back.

And what software?

Well not to start any flame wars here but I tend to fall back to iTerm2 + Vim for all the things. I have tried other text editors in the past like emacs, Sublime, Atom and PyCharm. Most of my work is done one the command line so inevitably I fall back to Vim. In fact, I’m writing this now with Vim in between test runs :). In my other role as a ReactJS dev I do use Sketch for UI design and visualization.

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

I run a vanilla configuration. On some rainy day when I have nothing to do I will get around to modifying the firmware to blink the LED’s to music or signal notifications. All together the team has four ErgoDox keyboards in the pod so I don’t have any excuses.

What would be your dream setup?

No computer at all! Okay okay, we are still a long ways away from that but I really like the idea of developing on something akin to an iPad. At the very least having an iPad with a travel ErgoDox EZ that somehow folds up nicely. Hey you did ask for my dream setup!