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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.