Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Ryan, a developer, programmer, software engineer or whatever you want to call it, and I’ve been doing it for pay since I was about 24. Presently, I spend my time working on the authentication and authorization portions of our business, as well as helping author and maintain a handful of the micro services that make up our “flagship product”.

What hardware do you use?

At work, I have an original ErgoDox EZ in black with blank keys and the Cherry MX Browns to keep the noise down. At home, I have an original ErgoDox EZ in white with the Gateron Blues from a couple years ago. I have a 34” curved monitor in both places, one from LG at home, the 34UC87M-B, and some Dell monitor at work that was provided. I’m using the company laptop, which is a 15” 2018 MBP. I’m not a fan of the touch bar, but I love the fingerprint scanner. All in all, my work setup feels a lot like my home setup. I tried to keep it that way to keep working from home feeling like work, rather than time to watch Netflix and raid the fridge every few minutes.

And what software?

I’d say 80% of my time is spent in IDEA from JetBrains with the indispensable IdeaVim plugin. I don’t do any Java these days, but their Go plugin makes it work exactly like GoLand, and there are plugins to give it all the WebStorm and DataGrip functionality, too, so I have everything I need in the Java IDE where I don’t write Java. That’s all for writing code, but for the rest of the job, like testing endpoints, running scripts, builds, tailing logs, etc., I use things like Insomnia, iTerm2, make, Docker, Vim, etc.

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

I haven’t customized anything physically about my keyboards. What ErgoDox EZ built and sent is just right. I do use a custom layout with keys specific to shortcuts I set up for BetterSnapTool and some of the more common things I do in IDEA like moving around break points, finding usages of symbols, jumping to definitions in code, or rebuilding and running.

What would be your dream setup?

I feel like I’m there already. My dream setup is one I don’t really notice. I think the Shine version is beautiful, but I enjoy my work the most when my fingers can execute what’s in my head without conscious consideration. With natural width placement of the halves and the customizability of each key, I get just that.