The people who use our boards.

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

I’m a software engineer at Microsoft in Austin, Texas 🤠. I’m an engineer to my core and love building things. From coding, to 3D printing, to building race cars, or going to the gym and building muscle. At work I’m very C# & Python-oriented and building AI-powered web applications. It has been a lot of MCP servers and clients lately. At home I’m building AI models writing a lot of Rust & Python. Going to film an experimental AI PC upgrade for my YouTube channel during my vacation.

When I get burnt out on coding, I work on my race car in my garage. Currently building an LS3-powered Subaru WRX in my garage and filming it for YouTube. I just started my first ever channel and I’m going to be uploading some content. Hopefully it doesn’t suck 🫣 lol. You guys will be the judge! Made my first car part using Onshape and printed it with Craftcloud. If you want instructions on how not to build a race car, follow my channel 🤣

What hardware do you use?

Everything… All of it… lol… My work laptops are a mix of Core i7 & Snapdragon X elite Windows machines. Some Linux dev boxes, but for work it’s obviously very Windows-heavy. For home I have an M4 Mac Studio and a Windows-based AI PC I built (only 50ish teraflops). Raspberry Pi and Pi OS for some tinkering.

I really thought my Mac Studio would be more powerful than it is. It’s okay, but not worth the price at all. The i7 core AI PC I built is a thousand dollars cheaper and does everything faster. The cake is a lie and so is unified memory, lol (gonna hurt some feelings with that one 😜).

I’m always trying out new hardware and I love new tech. New Meta glasses were great for the price but need improvement. I’m really hoping smart glasses take off more. I want to use my ErgoDox with smart glasses someday.

And what software?

My preferred IDE is Visual Studio 2026. That is just what I have spent the most time with and gotten very fast at. Although GitHub Copilot has gotten very very good over the last year. I never seen any software move that fast in terms of capability. So I have been doing a bit more coding through VS Code and PowerShell to kick off Copilot agents or commands. I could definitely see myself going to more terminal based or lighter weight IDEs in the future.

During my free time I use a lot of different stuff (all of the things). Onshape & OrcaSlicer for race car parts. I have gotten pretty comfortable with ComfyUI (regular & Intel AI Playground versions), VLLM, and OLLAMA. The unified memory is good for running small text models. But its teraflops are so low that you can load a model that will take forever to complete a thought. Some of my QWEN coding questions can take a long time to complete, even though the model fits just fine in memory. For YouTube I use Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Affinity Photo. Mac Studio does great at the photo editing, so I see why people like it, but the last step of rendering is AI PC all day. All the coding I do in my free time on the weekend is very experimental, so a lot if it is just terminal- and Notepad-based stuff.

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

I went through many keyboards through the early 2000s. Finally I found my first split keyboard from China in 2010. It was a savior for my wrists. It was also terrible and had no key mapping or software. But my wrists were happy, so I continued using it. Then five or six years later a friend showed me the ErgoDox EZ keyboard, and I knew at that point I would never need another keyboard again.

You astute pixel peepers out there may have noticed that I have three of them and would like to ask a valid question: Why not use a KVM switch? It’s because the setup moves from time to time and the computers are not always in the same place. Also each keyboard is running a different set of MX switches. Kailh x Jellyfish switches are currently my favorite. They have maximum tactile feel and a loud click, with the softest activation I have found.

What would be your dream setup?

My ideal setup is pretty wild. Although after watching the pants keyboard Matt Horton mentioned in his previous interview, maybe my ideal setup isn’t that wild 😂

I would actually love to have a pair of Meta or Apple glasses that either are a computer or could at least connect to a computer. And then I could connect my ErgoDox keyboard to them. That way I could walk around and type code. I have tried many kinds of speech-to-text or hand gesture-based computing, and they never work the way I want them to. There is something about typing with my fingers that will always stay with me. Even if I installed a Bluetooth chip in my brain and could type with my mind, part of me thinks I would still prefer typing on a mechanical keyboard with my fingers. The exact same way racers prefer a manual gear box even though it’s slower. Sometimes it’s just about the feeling 😊