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

I’m Jesuloba, a software engineer based in Toronto, Canada. I currently work at a fintech startup building out an enterprise cold storage solution for digital assets. The scope of my job is pretty wide and involves me contributing to several parts of the stack including: frontend; backend; and DevOps/infrastructure using tools such as TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, React, Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, etc. On the side, I have technical interests in cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, security, and distributed/decentralized systems, so I end up building side projects in these topic areas using tools such as Go, Python, and C++. Many of these interests developed while completing my undergrad in Networking and I.T. Security at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Outside of my technical work, I have a few other interests that keep me “alive.” I love music and melodies a lot, so I spend a lot of time discovering and listening to a lot of music. I listen to a bunch of genres, but my favourites at the moment are experimental/underground/jazz hip hop, lofi, Amapiano, Afrobeat, house, drill, and grime. When I was younger, I actually got into music production for a bit but it never stuck with me, as I developed other dreams—hoping to get back into it as a hobby at some point though. I enjoy reading books—mainly technical, fictional, and self-improvement books—as it’s a means to unplug from constant technology. There’s also the additional benefits of learning new things and expanding my knowledge. Photography is another thing I enjoy. I find symmetry and minimalism visually pleasing, so I enjoy taking photos that adhere to those themes—mainly on my smartphone, but I plan on picking up a camera soon.

To remain active, I also enjoy participating in sports and working out. I did a lot of sports back in the day so that part of me still remains, though to a lesser degree. I mostly participate in the following sports: basketball, soccer, swimming, skiing, and longboarding.

What hardware do you use?

My workstation consists of a six-monitor setup that powers my main rig as well as my work rig. The monitors I use are the 21.5” BenQ GW2283. They are pretty great for the price as they have almost no bezels, have the IPS technology with 178-degree viewing angles, and supposedly have eye-care technology. For peripherals, I have a couple of keyboards and a mouse. My main keyboard is the ErgoDox EZ, while my beater keyboard, which is more likely to leave the house with me, is the 60% Anne Pro II keyboard. As for a mouse, I use the Logitech MX Master 2S.

I usually consume sound through headphones, earphones, or studio monitors. My main headphones are the Sony WH-XB900 while my gaming/meetings headphones are the SteelSeries Arctis 5. My earphones of choice are the Apple AirPods. And finally, my studio monitors are the M-Audio AV32 monitors.

My main rig is a dual boot Intel-based system, while my work rig is simply a 16” 2020 MacBook Pro that is always docked behind my monitors. Technically I have a third rig, which consists of four Raspberry Pis with 4GB of memory that form a cluster to power my tiny private cloud. The main rig has the Intel i5 6600K CPU, which has been stably overclocked to 4.2GHz for a few years now. The operating systems I have installed are Ubuntu and Windows 10. I haven’t touched the Windows side in a few months, as I can’t stand working on Windows. The rig powers all six of my monitors using two Nvidia GPUs: the 1050 and 1050Ti. The system currently uses three sticks of HyperX Fury DDR4 memory summing to a total of 32 GB with one more expansion slot remaining. For storage, I currently use a couple of 120GB Kingston SSDs to store my OSs, while I have a 1TB hard disk for extra storage.

And what software?

I use quite a lot of software to achieve my daily tasks, be it for work or for personal stuff. When I’m coding, I find myself mainly revolving around Neovim, Firefox, the terminal and VScode. While collaborating with my team/friends I use Slack, Discord, Github, Gitlab, and Jira. Other miscellaneous software I use include: Spotify, Kubernetes, k9s, Docker, and Notion.

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

My keyboard setup is literally like it was off the shelf. I haven’t added any keycaps or done anything crazy to the configurations. I wanted to get a feel for the keyboard first before deciding if I needed any modifications, but the defaults have served me well thus far. One modification I’d probably make soon is to switch out the default cables for something shorter and more compact.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d say I already have my dream setup, to be honest. I dreamt about the six-monitor setup for a long time and finally pieced together an initial version back in 2017. It looks a lot different now than it did back then, for sure. I doubt I’d have another dream setup, though, so the plan for now is to evolve this setup to the best possible version it can be while having ergonomics and productivity at the back of my mind.