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 Salvador, a software engineer. I have been programming for more than 20 years now. I started at a very low level in C/C++, points of sale, video games, micro controllers, PIC, you name it.

For the past five years, I have worked as a remote consultant for various US companies. One of the only good things that the pandemic brought was the shift to remote work and the newfound openness to exploring the idea of being out of the office.

Outside of work, I am a family guy. I have four kids and three dogs, so there is always room for craziness and fun with the kids and my wife.

My main hobby may be creating cool coffee infusions and latte art. I started this espresso journey about 3-4 months ago. I was looking for a way to make lattes—my regular Starbucks drink—at home, but there is so much content out there for coffee lovers. I probably watched around 10-20 hours of YouTube videos on how to make good lattes and iced drinks, latte art, boba drinks, etc.

I’m all in for simple, strong lattes, but from time to time, my niece or my oldest kid is in for a treat, and they enjoy vanilla, caramel, or cacao infusions with their frozen lattes or boba drinks.

For some odd reason, I’m good at making drinks. I have purchased tapioca on Amazon and gone through the long cooking process. After that, I let it cool down in pure vanilla, with a cinnamon-and-brown sugar syrup I made by boiling water with cinnamon and adding enough brown sugar to taste without giving you diabetes, lol.

That syrup has such a great taste that it can go well with everything. I can grab boba pearls from the syrup and put them in milk with ice, and they will give enough sweetness and flavor, but if you are feeling fancy we can first create a shake like banana, strawberry, or pure cacao and then put the boba with the syrup on top to add flavor and the chewing experience that is top-notch. An espresso shot pairs well with almost everything because its wide variety of flavors can complement other flavors.

I fell in love with a Picopresso and then got into grinders, freshly roasted beans, and the whole nine yards of coffee gadgets. I have my eye on a Meraki machine, but it doesn’t ship to Mexico for the time being.

I’m grinding using a Wacaco Exagrind. I wanted to start very minimalistic with the coffee hobby, and the quieter manual grinding process has been great. I will probably upgrade it by Thanksgiving Day to a 1Zpresso K-Ultra.

My daily coffee gadgets are the Subminimal Subscale, the NanoFoamer from Subminimal, the WDT, and pretty much everything else is from Normcore: the portafilter, the 18-gram basket, the bottle to spray water, the towels, and last but not least, the cup weight to get my 2/1 ratio on each espresso cup.

My expresso machine is a De’Longhi ECP3420. It gets the job done and has taught me a lot about the process. I’m still dabbling in the idea of getting that Meraki or a Gaggia UP—now that it has the pressure reading and the temperature display, it looks promising—but on the fancier side I love the orange color of the Profitec GO as well.

Now that I think about it, that’s how I ended up finding the Voyager keyboard. I watch Primagen’s YouTube content, and he always talks about the great feel of mechanical keyboards and the cool haptic feedback of using one. But a lot of brands don’t ship to Mexico, so I found ZSA, and my dream was fulfilled.

Another thing I love to do after hours is sink some time into game programming. I have the fever dream of creating a couple of games, seeing how that goes, and eventually leaning more into it until I can transition my whole career and experience into game dev. Who knows, I might be able to make some history from Mexico by creating great game experiences that are beyond tacos, wrestling, and narcos.

What hardware do you use?

I have a MacBook Pro M2 Max with 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage—not too shabby, but I’m aiming to get a Mac Studio M4 Max at some point this year or wait for the incoming M5 Max Studio. I have a dual-monitor setup and my lovely Voyager, which I carry everywhere I go.

I was also starting to get some hand and wrist pain from time to time, so I spent a good amount of time researching split keyboards and the ergonomics, but a lot of brands either do not ship to Mexico, or the only way to get them is to purchase them from another person, and they almost double the price that way. After looking out for a few weeks, I found the ZSA products and watched quite a few YouTube videos about them, and then I took a look at the website, and I had such a joyful moment when I realized that ZSA actually ships to Mexico, and the time wasn’t even that long. It took about two weeks from when the order was created till the moment it arrived at my place.

I like to hear music while I work. My current audio setup is a Klipsch ProMedia Heritage 2.1 120W. I love the subwoofer sound and the powerful bass that it gives to my favorite genres of music. I’m in love with jazz, especially in the mornings when I’m working for the first couple of hours, and the house is all silent, you can hear only the wind whizzing through the branches of the big tree that is in the middle of my house, right next to the pool, and the water bouncing.

As for a specific artist, I’m all over the place. When I was a teenager and in my 20s, I used to hear a lot of R&B by artists like Brian McKnight, Usher, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, and many more, but nowadays they're only played on specific occasions when the vibe is right. Sometimes I jump into pop like Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson, ’N Sync, Backstreet Boys—no shame hahaha.

Now, as an older, almost-forties dad of four kids, I enjoy songs that resonate with my soul. Blues and jazz are like heaven on earth, and they get me in the zone for coding for hours on end in a Zen mode.

And what software?

I use iTerm for everything: cURL calls, coding via nvim, launching processes, inspecting data, spinning containers, etc.

Apart from that, I use VS Code and the Brave browser. I haven’t deep-dived into audio or video creation, but that's right around the corner. I’m still deciding whether to start a YouTube channel about game design and game programming that helps the Latin American community and gives new generations more tools in their belt beyond using commercial engines.

I code in C++ in my free time, either on low-level electronic projects with a Raspberry Pi or in the game engine I’m developing with SDL3. For day-to-day hustle work, I work as a full-stack developer, mostly leaning into the backend (C#, Python, NodeJS, Java, you name it!) and AWS, but from time to time, I have to deep-dive into Figma and work with React and Vue.

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

Oh, I’m a very simple guy, and also super impatient. When I got my Voyager keyboard, it was the first time that I was using a split keyboard, so to say that I was hyped is an understatement. For the first week, I was even dreaming of typing. I was looking forward each night to waking up and keeping on using it to improve and learn the setup and the advantages of the layers and how to master it as fast as possible so I could feel proficient writing code without massive backspacing all day.

I was super committed to learning the layout and the proper finger movements to type and activate the layers for special characters or functions like screen capture on the Mac.

I think I put in like 20 hours in the first week on the Keybr website, training myself to use the keyboard properly, so by the time that I was proficient with the keyboard I was already very used to the default layout. I never went back to do configurations on it besides a few months ago, when I purchased the trackball that was recently launched for the Voyager and I had to create a new template that had the right sensitivity and speed for the trackball.

I can’t get enough of using the keyboard. I enjoy every keystroke on it and it just feels right—I now can completely understand what ThePrimagen was trying to explain. Also using Neovim on the keyboard is just super fun, an almost game-like experience of coding and getting the mechanical feedback on each keypress. The cherry on top is the trackball that was integrated on it; now I don’t even need to extend my arm and go back and forth between mouse and keyboard. It’s completely a game-changer, and my wrist and hand pain is completely gone.

What would be your dream setup?

Since I already clarified that I’m a super simple guy, I think I’m almost in heaven right now.

Once I can get my hands on a top-tier M5 MacBook Pro Max and maybe a new adjustable-height desktop, I will be golden. I was considering a Herman Miller chair, but since sitting all day isn’t healthy, I think that having a great chair defeats the purpose of standing up more often.

Currently, I have a pair of good speakers and a subwoofer that play jazz very well, but I can probably raise the bar with higher-end equipment and create a surround-sound office space to fully zoom in and enjoy my already lovely workday even more.