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

My name’s Jon Niehof, and I guess I’m still figuring out who I am. Work-wise, I’m best described as a research software engineer: I have a Ph.D. in astronomy and spend most of my time developing software and systems to process and analyze scientific data, rather than writing a lot of first-author papers. Currently I’m working on Parker Solar Probe and the upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe and HelioSwarm missions. In support of those efforts, I’m one of the main developers of the SpacePy package.

Beyond work, I spend my time active outside as much as possible, mostly hiking and running but also cycling. I volunteer for a regional outdoors club, both leading trips and instructing new leaders. And I volunteer for the local search and rescue team.

What hardware do you use?

My home and travel machine is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon and my in-office machine is an aging ThinkPad T460.

I don’t need a lot of heavy iron. The office monitors are a stacked pair left over from integration of a previous instrument. The ZSA Moonlander is my main “luxury” item, since quality input is so important. I had a former student recommend since it had greatly reduced his neck and shoulder pain and what do you know, it actually works.

Most everything else is what I can easily get my hands on. The stand-sit desk and kneeling chair let me cycle through positions regularly so I don’t spend too long cramped up in any one position. The reMarkable 2 tablet is my other “luxury”; it’s replaced a lab notebook, several attempts at note-taking apps, and a pile of scratch paper.

Do not underestimate the importance of the debugging ducky.

And what software?

I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for 25+ years now, and Ubuntu for most of that. XFCE is my desktop, which largely exists to hold a bunch of xterms and emacs windows. The vast majority of my code uses the scientific Python stack, including numpy and scipy.

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

I use a custom layout that was based on the default with a few additions. I figured I’d get adjusted to the keyboard and then do a large from-scratch design. That never happened—I just did a few cycles of fixing what annoyed me and found that iterated to a pretty good solution.

I use the default keycaps, which means a lot of remembering what all the little line keys mean, but it’s not like I look at the keyboard much. I never thought I’d care about RGB lighting, but the “splash” pattern just makes me happy while I’m working away.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m not picky. If I got used to anything too nice, I’d be annoyed when I’m on the road and stuck with a laptop (for longer trips I do bring the Moonlander and split it across the laptop keyboard, a bit wide but doable). I enjoy the stacked monitors rather than a single large monitor, since it provides a little bit of structure. I wish somebody would come up with a good alternative to reaching for the mouse—I hate trackpads, and the ThinkPad trackpoint is so far the best of a bad lot.