Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Rob and I am an Advanced Care Paramedic from Alberta, Canada. I work off-ambulance in a clinic for a manufacturing facility which employs a population of ~500 employees. My job is to assist this population with health concerns that arise during the work day. Anything from a nail through the hand to assisting the not-so-computer-literate book a lab appointment walks through my door.

With such a relatively small population of workers, occasionally there are not enough patients to fill a full day’s work. Being in idle situations like this is not an environment I excel in, so I’ve recently picked up programming as an auxiliary skill to employ the use of during this downtime. I’ve built a couple things to help out the safety department onsite, like a web store for ordering and tracking the consumption of safety equipment like gloves, and a training tracking system for tracking the expiry of training certifications. It can make for a pretty absurd workday going from traversing a Stack Overflow-induced haze of debugging the most recent temperamental thing my code has decided to do, to 5 minutes later cleaning blood off the floor because the door flew open with someone clutching a finger that appeared to have attended a reenactment of the Red Wedding.

What hardware do you use?

• PC build
• Herman Miller Embody
• Standing desk
• Printer

And what software?

Sooo many, but here are my favorites right now:

• Visual Studio Code
• GIMP — so much better UI/UX than Photoshop; give it a try!
• 3T Studio — if you work with MongoDB, this is a must-have.
• IrfanView — bulk image editing, good for compressing loads of images.

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

Here’s my most recent layout.

A while back, I starting having issues with my wrists. Before becoming a patient myself, the ErgoDox EZ was the tool I employed to avoid these warning signs turning into a lifelong debilitating illness.

I highly recommend the ErgoDox EZ as a solution for this problem. It’s not just the ergonomic position that helps; it’s the ability to stretch your hands out and move them to different positions that makes a huge difference — that along with switching to a Dvorak keyboard layout. Look at this difference in hand movement compared to QWERTY.

What would be your dream setup?

You’re looking at it!

But I guess I could get articulating mounts for the ErgoDox EZ that would allow my hands to be held to the side, upgrade all of the monitors to 144Hz, customize the ErgoDox to be wireless, get a hardwood tabletop instead of the cheap, hollow IKEA MDF I currently use — oh, and better cable management!