Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Demian Ginther. I am a Staff Software Engineer at Ad Hoc LLC. I specialize in system administration and automation, DevOps, and security. More specifically, I work from home building cloud infrastructure for government websites. Outside of work, I enjoy traveling with my wife, watching movies, playing Magic: The Gathering, bicycling, working out, collecting mechanical watches, and cooking.

What hardware do you use?

I use primarily a closed/docked MacBook Pro with dual Dell 23” monitors for work. The monitors are on a spalted maple monitor stand that I made myself. I use an Apple Magic Trackpad for mouse input, situated in-between the two ErgoDox EZ halves. The desk is a motorized sit-stand desk, and for when I am sitting, a Herman Miller Aeron chair. I installed some shelves above my workstation to hold my collection of Masterpiece Transformers and a few other collectibles.

I also have a Windows laptop and a couple of other Mac Minis doing various things around my house, as well as a media server that runs Linux.

And what software?

I use a variety of desktop software to perform my daily job, including Chrome, Visual Studio Code, Slack, Spark for email, Fantastical 3, iTerm2, 1Password, and then a variety of other tools like Python, Terraform, Ansible, etc.

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

Because I am not a perfect touch-typist, I use a slightly modified default keyboard layout. I remapped the spacebar onto both thumb clusters, because my muscle memory for the spacebar is strong on both hands, and I remapped Backspace to left pinky where Caps Lock would normally be and the Enter key to my right pinky, next to ;. Looking at getting some keycaps, but my brain is slowly learning where all the special characters are! I haven’t delved into layers much yet.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would be fairly close to what I have now, except I would probably replace the dual 23” monitors with a single ultrawide 5k monitor, or a pair of curved 4k monitors.