The people who use our boards.

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

I’m Martin, a freelance software consultant based in Košice, Slovakia. I run my own one-person company and work primarily with TypeScript, Go, and Elixir—mostly on web platforms and backend systems. Outside of client work, I maintain Hive Pal, an open-source beekeeping app with a small but growing community of users.

I keep six beehives, which I inherited as a passion from my late father—it’s equal parts meditative and chaotic. Beekeeping is a nice hobby. My dad was a beekeeper and one day I read The History of Bees by Maja Lunde, which deals with father-son relationships, and I decided to start helping him with the bees. He then gave me some hives of my own, and when he passed away a year ago I took over.

I ferment things: kefir, sauerkraut, sourdough. The funny thing about kefir is my daughter Emma has loved it since she was one year old, so I have to sometimes keep it hidden from her. It took me a while to get a decent kefir going, but I found the key is, just like for most things in life, consistency: Just feed the same amount at the same time and it will turn out fine.

We have a large garden with fruit trees, berries, and vegetables in the summer—the greenhouse helps stretch the season a bit. In the garden we have several trees, some freshly planted and some older. Peach, pear, cherry, sea buckthorn, walnuts, I love them all the same. The most unusual is maybe the service/sorb tree (Sorbus domestica), whych had fruit for the first time last year.

I run five times a week and I’m currently training for a marathon. I also have a 3D printer and a cold plunge barrel out there, which tells you something about the kind of person I am. I play guitar and piano, read (and listen to) a lot of Terry Pratchett, and then there's my daughter Emma, who gets bedtime stories featuring a rotating cast of characters she's very opinionated about.

What hardware do you use?

My main machine is a desktop running a Ryzen 9 with 32 cores and 64GB RAM—it handles everything from client work to running local services without breaking a sweat. I have three monitors.

The keyboard is a Moonlander, heavily customized—it’s really the center of gravity for how I interact with everything. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time on the layout and I regret nothing.

For the home lab I have a Lenovo System x3550 as the main workhorse, plus a handful of Odroids and Raspberry Pis scattered around for various tasks. It started as a hobby and slowly became infrastructure I actually rely on.

And a Prusa Core One for 3D printing, which gets used for everything from hive components to random household fixes. I bought the Core One very recently and am pretty happy. Once you have a 3D printer, you find that every problem usually has a 3D-printed solution. :D

And what software?

I used Arch Linux for 15 years, with a couple of years’ break where I used macOS. But after I got a desktop and laptop, I was looking for ways to have them in sync. Long story short, I discovered NixOS. The learning curve is steep, and there were dozens of times when I thought I was giving up, but eventually it clicked, and I'm quite happy. The nice thing about it is that my laptop and my desktop are in sync: The installed apps, settings, desktop environment, everything lives in a single config that is committed to GitHub. If my computer blows up, I can be up and running the same thing on a different machine in about 30 minutes, which is pretty cool.

Everything runs NixOS—desktop, home lab, all of it. Having the entire system configuration as code is one of those things that feels like overhead until you've had to rebuild a machine and it just works.

For the desktop environment I use Hyprland with Noctalia Shell. Terminal is kitty, multiplexer is Zellij, editor is Neovim with AstroNvim. Browser is Firefox. It's a very keyboard-driven workflow, which pairs well with the Moonlander.

The home lab runs a bunch of self-hosted services: Vaultwarden for passwords, Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media, Syncthing for file sync across devices, and Home Assistant for home automation. The list keeps growing—it's a blessing and a curse.

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

My daily driver is the Moonlander, and I also use a Corne when I want something more portable. Both run custom layouts.

I’m on QWERTY—I’ve thought about switching to something like Colemak but keep putting it off, mostly because of Neovim muscle memory. Maybe someday.

The layout has a dedicated symbol layer, a number layer, and—most importantly—a dedicated layer for tetr.io. Priorities.

What would be your dream setup?

Honestly, I’m pretty close to it already. There was a period where I was constantly tweaking—new layout experiments, restructuring my NixOS config, swapping things around—but that's settled down a lot. I’ve landed somewhere that just works, and I don't feel the urge to change things for the sake of it anymore.

The one thing I’ve been eyeing is more RAM—64GB is plenty for most things, but there's always a voice in the back of my head saying “what if more.” Current prices have been a convincing counterargument though.