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

Starting with the hardest question first, are we? Honestly, I never really know how to answer concisely because I don’t have the “three things I am all about” to put between | bars | on my LinkedIn profile title. But let’s try: I am a husband, a godfather to a fast-growing two-year-old, and a Swiss-American. I feel strongly about beauty and elegance, not just on the surface but also when it comes to—let’s call it “functional aesthetics.” For example, is a tool well-suited for its job? Does using it delight users and add to their sense of competence?

I am an independent consultant and a generalist. I studied business, psychology, information systems, and cybersecurity, and finally graduated with a PhD in Information and Decision Sciences from the University of Minnesota. I worked in software development and management consulting roles before striking out on my own. In my career, I’ve written a lot of long-lived software¹ and made a lot of short-lived PowerPoint slides. I’ve given presentations to boards of publicly traded companies, driven forklifts, made lattes, developed training and change management programs, and helped ERP implementations succeed. No two challenges are alike, which I love, and it keeps me on my toes.

Being self-employed and loving most of what I do, there’s no strict line between work and “outside of work.” I enjoy hiking in the Swiss mountains, making fractal art, and marveling at the beauty of creation—both by spending time in nature and by learning and seeing the amazing elegance of life in things like immunology and biochemistry as well as code and everyday things.

What hardware do you use?

Mainly a Dell XPS 13 9310 (11th Gen i7, 32GB RAM, 2TB SDD). It’s going onto five years and has been rock-solid and great to travel with. I love hardware that lasts.

In my office, I have an IKEA standing desk with a 40” curved 5K LG 40WP95CP-W display that also serves as a docking station (USB-C rocks) and makes three-column tiling layouts work so nicely. I used to have a dual-screen setup, but ever since 4K became affordable, I prefer to get everything I need onto one screen and flip between virtual desktops as needed.

Then, of course, there are the keyboards. So many keyboards. When I had a “big corporate job” as CIO, I had to write a lot of emails. Doing it on a clicky keyboard brought so much joy to my day-to-day.

We own an ErgoDox EZ that has become my wife’s daily driver, a Planck from ZSA, a Moonlander, a Voyager, a UHK60v2, a Keychron K17 Pro, a Keychron V5 Max, a Logitech G413, a Logitech K845… the collection has certainly built up. Some people store wealth in gold bullion; mine seems to be in mechanical keyboards.

I use a Synology DS1621 as NAS (though I am frustrated that its OS is stuck on a Linux 4.4 kernel) with an off-site backup. Then, I run a cheap Hetzner VPS for some 24/7 services and as a build server. Finally, there are a couple of Raspberry Pis around, one to run VPN and Pi-hole (which didn’t want to work nicely on the Synology because it also runs as AD Server), and a couple for occasional pet projects.

And what software?

I’m a big fan of and advocate for UNIX Philosophy—things that do one thing and do it well, like ZSA keyboards and their rationale for not including Bluetooth or wireless options. This shows up in some of my software choices, too, as does my pragmatism. I prefer simple, stable, effective solutions to perfect or fancy ones.

I use Void Linux² with KDE Plasma and Krohnkite³. Now that I’ve got the hang of tiling, I find it hard to imagine working any other way. For comms, I primarily use Slack and Thunderbird and sometimes Signal and Discord. I have Chromium set up with multiple profiles, one per client. This is the best way I’ve found so far to work with multiple Microsoft Teams accounts (which most of my clients use, he said with a heavy sigh), far easier than what the app supports natively. I also use VSCode, Neovim, KeePassXC, Flameshot, Meld, DB Browser for SQLite, Firefox (for some pages that don’t work well in Chromium), and xfreerdp (to connect to Windows machines) almost every day. Then I need bash, a C compiler, Python, Docker, git, rsync, sqlite3, and ssh, and life is good.

I use V for some things. It’s a new language that I think gets a ton of things right and has a very competent group of core developers.

There’s no way around Excel in my line of work. For that, I have a VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Office 2010, which is lightning fast. Everything opens in a split second. Maybe I don’t deal well with change, or maybe I just really like things that work great without an internet connection (and that I paid for once to use forever).

Finally, keyd is essential for when I don’t have the luxury of using a configurable keyboard. It gets remarkably close to making ordinary keyboards do fancy things we’ve come to expect from having customizable firmware.

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

I am always tweaking something in my keyboard layouts. In fact, I just had to update my layout tour because of all the recent changes. However, I have settled on a few must-haves. First, I must be able to use Vimlike navigation with h, j, k, l as arrow keys and y, u, i, o as their steroid versions (Home, PgDn, PgUp, End). Caps + x must work as Delete, with Caps + z as Backspace. I require an easy way to compose umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and guillemets («») for writing Swiss German without having to change keyboard layouts. And my ortholinear keyboards must have a NumPad layer.

I made a big mistake early on, which was trying to change to Colemak and ortholinear at the same time. It took me a while to unlearn so I could get decent at each on its own. Now I use QWERTY on my ortholinear keyboards and once I am very comfortable with that, I may come back to giving Colemak-DH another try.

Inspired by Robin’s post, I am experimenting with Home Row Modifiers again. I tried before, got frustrated, and left them alone for a while. Robin’s tip about starting with Shift and arranging them by frequency of use made them much more sensible, but I am still getting used to them.

I try to keep my layouts as closely aligned as possible between my different ZSA keyboards and my keyd setup.

What would be your dream setup?

I am generally very happy with my setup. If I could change one thing, it would be completely eliminating fan noise. I enjoy the sound of keys clicking. Fan noise, not so much.