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

My name is Esther. I’m from Germany and I have been living in Berlin since 2010.

I used to work as an engineering manager, and as a software developer before that. I left the tech industry in 2022 after fifteen years to take some much-needed time off and then go back to university and get a psychology degree. My goal is to work as a therapist in a couple of years.

During my tech career I mostly dealt with web stuff, what you would call “full stack” today—but back when I started, that term didn’t exist. I was just a developer, so naturally I did all the things from setting up databases and firewall rules, to writing backend applications, all the way to front-end widgets and a bit of UI and visual design. I never really specialized, and I still like being able to make a working piece of software all by myself if I have to and to have the ability to maintain and fix every aspect of it.

I don’t have any formal degree (yet), but I did study chemistry at university for two years before dropping out and starting a job as a software developer.

Outside of work, I ride my Brompton a lot, I make electronic music and digital art, I write both fiction and nonfiction occasionally, and I love to cook, improvising new things rather than sticking to recipes.

I sometimes get sucked deep into a video game (on PlayStation mostly). My favourite game of all time is Dark Souls 3. Other notable games are: Journey, Dear Esther, Final Fantasy VIII, Destiny, Hades, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Mass Effect.

I volunteer as a bike mechanic for a local organisation that maintains a fleet of free-to-use cargo bikes in Berlin.

I also probably spend way too much time on Twitter.

What hardware do you use?

My main computer is currently an M1 Mac mini hooked up to an HP Z27 monitor. I tried the laptop lifestyle for a while with a MacBook Pro, but at heart I’m a desktop person. I also use an iPad Pro for drawing and writing. For my writing setup, I put the iPad into a small tripod in portrait orientation. On the go, I use an iPhone 13 mini (red).

For music production, I use a Eurorack modular synthesizer, a Moog Slim Phatty analog synth, a Lyra-8 drone synth, and a Yamaha CP88 stage piano along with some other gear, like the M8 tracker and Polyend Seq sequencer.

I shoot video on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, and for still photography I use an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III. They use the same lens mount, so that’s convenient. I can use my 17, 25, and 45mm primes on both cameras. Outdoors I sometimes bring a GoPro Hero9 with the media mod.

And what software?

For a couple years now, Visual Studio Code has been my main editor. Before I used Vim and then Emacs for a while. On my iPad, I use iA Writer.

Music production happens in Logic Pro, graphics and photo editing in Affinity Photo/Designer, and video work in DaVinci Resolve.

At the moment, my programming languages of choice are Ruby and Rust. When doing web frontend work, I prefer vanilla JavaScript.

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

I use a Moonlander on my desktop with Cherry MX brown switches at the moment, but I might change it back to MX Blues now that I no longer have coworkers who complain about the noise during calls.

For writing and when I’m travelling, I use a Planck EZ with Cherry MX Brown switches on my iPad Pro.

My keycaps are all the default ones for now. Both keyboards have purple/white LED lighting on their default layer. I try to keep their layouts somewhat similar as far as that’s possible so I can easily switch. I use extra layers on both to have easy access to German special characters and a few macros for text shortcuts that I have set up in macOS, e.g. a macro on [layer 3] + [7] that fires off /swt results in a 😅.

What would be your dream setup?

I really want an old brass or wooden bookstand for my iPad writing setup so I don’t need the little tripod for that anymore, which is a bit of a hack. But I haven’t found one that I’m really happy with. Otherwise, I’m very happy with things the way they are.