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

I’m Magda. I work as a software developer, mainly focusing on the backend side. At home, I code to solve trivial problems—“the MFA authenticator application is slow, I will code myself a better one!”—and also do some more serious projects with friends. Besides that, I enjoy playing video games (A Short Hike and Plague Tale being my favorite ones), and although I wouldn’t call myself an artist, I have always loved fiber arts like crochet, knitting, and sewing. I make lots of scarves for friends and sew clothes for myself.

What hardware do you use?

The main machine is an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with an Asus TUF curved monitor—both hiding a mess of cables behind. For input devices I use the Voyager keyboard and Logitech Lift mouse. Since I listen to music a lot while working, there is also a JBL speaker and Beats Fit earbuds. At the office, I switch to whatever hardware is there but bring my Lift mouse and BM40 keyboard.

As the base I use an Ikea desk that is 140 cm wide and provides enough space for an all-purpose setup. When needed, I can put the sewing machine there. Recently I also started doing some painting, and the chair reclines so I can relax and play video games with the Xbox controller connected to the laptop.

And what software?

VSCode does most of the heavy lifting, with Windows Terminal running on a small screen all the time. I use Firefox at home and Arc browser at work because it’s great for organizing all the open tabs. For debugging I still prefer Firefox and its DevTools. Insomnia is a must-have for all API-related tasks, and Beekeeper for databases. Unless I’m writing some Markdown, I use kSuite for documents and Excalidraw for quick charts.

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

At base it’s a standard QWERTY layout, but everything around it is a constant work in progress. I use a Voyager at home and a BM40 at work, and trying to get a similar layout working on these two has been quite a challenge. Having layer keys in the thumb cluster on the Voyager allowed me to move arrows one position to the left and have the Enter key on the bottom—but on the BM40, the Enter key is on the upper column, so often on Monday mornings I press Right Arrow expecting to hit Enter. The layout has a numpad on a left-hand layer with corresponding shift characters at the same positions on a separate layer. Under the right half I have all brackets, quotation marks, and numerical symbols. For some keys that are in the rightmost column, like Enter and Backspace, there is a layer shortcut symmetrical on the left hand so when using the mouse I don’t need to constantly move the hand just to press Backspace.

The only modification I did with the Voyager was lubing the switches. The BM40 has lubed and taped switches, foam under the board and under the top plate, and also sound-dampened screws. I purchased a Ducky blank keycap set recently and previously had been using some random one from AliExpress.

What would be your dream setup?

There is some cable management to improve, but mainly I would love to get the keyboard layout working on both Voyager and BM40, so there is less friction when switching between them.