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

I am JL. I am a senior software engineer, and outside of work I play video games and pursue other hobbies like 3D printing, building computers, setting up my own home server, etc.

What hardware do you use?

For my home desktop I have a Mini-ITX case, the NR200, which I’m a huge fan of, with an MSI B-series ITX board, an AMD 7600X CPU, a 3070 as the GPU, and a Noctua air cooler.

For my desk I have a standing desk—not a fancy one, but one that’s solid and reliable enough—from Radlove.

I like to have monitors that are on the smaller side, so I have a Lenovo G24qe, which is the only 24-inch 1440p display monitor with a decent refresh rate on the market, and a very old, cheap Acer 24-inch 1080p monitor (I want to upgrade that one but I haven’t found anything that strikes my fancy). As for audio, I use simple earbuds and a desk microphone from HyperX. I used to prefer to have a headset, but they really tire my head and ears pretty quickly, so I ended up switching and haven’t looked back since.

My mouse is a DELUX vertical mouse, which is pretty solid, and I have a desk mat with a bunch of Linux commands on it from Pixie Cube.

My daily driver for my home PC is the ErgoDox EZ. I use the Moonlander for my work setup, as I think the layout of the ErgoDox EZ makes for an easier transition in games, while the layout of the Moonlander is perfect for my custom coding layout.

I also have a Steelcase Think chair, which is very comfortable, and I’m thinking of buying another Steelcase chair for my office setup.

In my office setup I have two monitors—one vertical, one horizontal—and a laptop stand for my work M1 MacBook Pro and also a standing desk. I use the Moonlander and put the MacBook Magic Trackpad in the middle in between both sides of the Moonlander, as I switch which hand to use the trackpad depending on what I’m doing.

And what software?

Software daily driver would be Discord and Firefox, and whatever game I’m playing at the time. I also always have a hardware monitor open and MSI Afterburner for overclocking my GPU.

I use VS Code or SSH into my home server and use Vim when I’m working on a home project.

For work, my daily driver is definitely VS Code and the terminal, as well as Chrome (my work webpages work better on Chrome, but I do use Firefox when I need to develop something in the front end). I also use BetterTouchTool to help me snap windows into my whole screen without going into full screen ’cause I really dislike Mac’s full-screen functionality.

I’m definitely missing some stuff, but the bottom line is I like to customize my stuff quite a bit.

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

For ErgoDox EZ: I use a custom QMK layout that I made myself by compiling and flashing my keyboard to add macros to my keyboard. The reason I went that approach was that I wanted to create a spammer macro that had a combination of keys and mouse clicks for a game. It also gives me a great deal of control to be able to add any kind of macro through code.

For Moonlander: I do use the default customizer from ZSA, though I don’t think I ever saved that layout (it was my first keyboard and so I set the keys and forgot about it :( ). Maybe I’ll redo the layouts soon.

As for custom keycaps, I’ve actually been looking for some, but haven’t pulled the trigger on them. I like the look and feel of the keycaps that my keyboards came with, but there’s a few things that make me want to find a good replacement.

1. The white keycaps do get dirty quickly, so I have to clean them often. Maybe a different color keycap would help it look better for longer.

2. Because the keyboard offers so many customizations, it doesn’t come with modifier keys marked on the keycaps.

I would like those based on my keyboard layout. I haven’t found a place that could do that yet :(, but I’m still looking. I might consider 3D printing my own custom keycaps once I get better at 3D printing, but for now I’m still looking for a place that can make the keycaps with custom labels.

What would be your dream setup?

I think I would upgrade my desk, and have a third monitor, and I would have all the monitors be 24 inches 1440p + 100Hz, preferably 120Hz (but that monitor literally only exists in China).

I would probably upgrade my chair to a Gesture and put my Think chair on my home office. (I give chair priority to my gaming desk because I usually use the standing position at the standing desk of my office.)

I would probably have labels on my ErgoDox EZ keycaps with all the modifier keys that I set, and I really want to add PSU to my setup for energy redundancy (and add one more to my home server).