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

Hey, my name is Sam and I am a software engineer based in Australia. Most recently I have been working remotely at a software scale-up building a web-based platform that uses machine learning and other modelling techniques for electrical grid design and analytics (primarily transmission and subtransmission—think geospatial data related to the long powerlines + lattice towers you see in outer city areas). I also have a personal consulting business that helps larger businesses get started on their machine learning processes—i.e. iteration with data collection, synthetic data generation and model training or fine-tuning for specific use cases.

Previously, I have worked in hardware control, orchestration, and data processing for companies in defence and science contexts. One of the coolest places I have worked is at a synchrotron facility, which is like a large timeshare microscope that generates light by bending electron paths for various types of imaging.

Outside of work my main passions are rock climbing, 3D printing, virtual reality, and electronics.

I think rock climbing as a hobby overselects engineers, particularly bouldering, which is very focused on creative problem-solving. If you’re reading this and have moved to a new city or are feeling lonely, I can’t recommend indoor bouldering enough for making new friends—or if you are an engineer, meeting even more engineers. Bouldering communities are generally extremely social and inclusive to newcomers.

I have been into 3D printing for over a decade (I got my first printer in 2012), with a focus on functional prints, and watching the progress over the last decade has been awesome. We have gone from building printers ourselves, babysitting prints, and neurotically re-levelling print beds to massive economies of scale, whereas a modern printer hardly breaks the bank, levels itself, and prints 10x faster than its predecessors. One less positive note on this is that the long-standing industry great, PRUSA Research, has been struggling to keep up with the aggressive competition it faces from market disruptors Bambu Lab, who focus on an easy user experience at the cost of openness. I own printers from both companies, but this is sad for me as a believer in open source and consumer-first practices, so I hope PRUSA’s latest printer improves their outlook and sells well—I plan to pick one up if Bambu continues to lock down their firmware.

Lastly, on VR: I love playing new VR games and experimenting with applications as they come out, seeing what’s possible and where the technology is headed. I’ve owned both the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest 3, and even as a bit of a VR zealot it seems obvious to me that we are fairly far away from it being a technology that will gain mass adoption. It’s just so hard to get the ergonomics where they need to be, particularly for immersive experiences that induce motion sickness in a large number of people. AR glasses are much better from this perspective and are rapidly improving, so I am excited for what we’ll see on that front in the coming years.

What hardware do you use?

I use a MacBook Pro for most standard dev work, and a dual boot desktop with a hefty GPU for VR and ML. For mousing, I use a Logitech G502 X Plus mouse; for keyboard, ZSA Voyager and some custom keyboards I had designed when I pursued a different form factor. My 3D printers are an original PRUSA MKIIIS and a Bambu Lab P1S.

My usual headphones are Focal Clear over-ears, but I also have some Thieaudio IEMs for when I need something lighter and portable. JDS Labs Atom stack has me covered for DAC and amp. My VR headset is a Meta Quest 3, connected via a Wi-Fi 6E wireless link.

I also have a few favourite hobbyist electronics tools. Omnifixo is an excellent soldering stand, and Saleae Logic Pro 8 helps me with debugging.

And what software?

The OSes I run are MacOS, Windows 11, and Ubuntu Linux. Raycast, Yazi, and AeroSpace up my productivity on macOS.

Previously I used Fusion 360 for mechanical CAD, but recently I’ve switched to Onshape. My PCB CAD go-to is KiCAD. My VR 3D modelling application is Shapelab. For non-engineering 3D modelling, Blender is the open source G.O.A.T.

Depending on context, the IDE I’m using is Cursor/VS Code, WebStorm, or Neovim. My preferred shell is Zsh.

For local audio transcription, I use whisper.cpp. For communications, it’s Discord and Signal.

My favourite (word)-le game is redactle.net, and my favorite VR game is HL Alyx. VR hardware support is the only thing keeping me hanging on with Windows 11.

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

My most-used keyboard is the ZSA Voyager with a tenting angle achieved using some magnetic phone stands that I saw recommended in this YouTube video. I was using a Mistel Barocco MD770 previously because I have always liked split keyboards, but it’s just a regular QWERTY keyboard chopped in half. When I switched to the Voyager I adopted a custom layout because that was one of the major value propositions of the product (shoutout to Robin Leinonen for great postpurchase support) and I wanted to challenge myself in learning a new layout.

I thought if you’re going to go non-QWERTY, why not go full niche? I found this repo for the Recurva layout—I thought it looked good and liked that it was named after an Australian tree species, so I made a layout based on it with home row mods and some considerations for programming symbol layouts.

I also have a fallback layer to QWERTY for games that don’t support key rebinding. That was around ten months ago, and I have loved the experience of learning a new layout and tweaking as I go—the version control built into Oryx is awesome. I have two Voyagers since I like to have backups of items I am fairly dependent on.

Overall, I love what ZSA has done with the Voyager, and there is only one use case I have found that made me feel that an accessory, or some specialisation might be needed: laptops on the go! Sometimes working with a laptop can be more dynamic than you expect, e.g. you’re at a hackathon and moving around a room to collaborate, or picking up your laptop to run off to a meeting room. In these cases I think the Voyager could benefit from a 3D-printed casing + wiring + magnetic latch that allows for the keyboard to be quickly attached/interfaced to a laptop such that users could quickly transition to this “mode” and use the keyboard effectively while moving frequently. I have designed my own thin keyboard inspired by the Voyager that is specialised for this, but I am also working on a prototype 3D-printed chassis case that would support the Voyager with a 14-inch MacBook Pro. I’ll share it with the folks at ZSA if I find it useful when it’s more complete.

What would be your dream setup?

I am not that obsessed with dream setups, and what I have already leaves me pretty satisfied (I wish KVMs had better support for high refresh rates, and they were better with switching between computers/peripherals), but I do regularly experiment with new ways of doing things. I am very interested in using “spatial computing” to achieve the ideal portable travel setup, so I am always trying out new VR headsets and applications to see whether it’s becoming more viable to ditch “real monitors,” but as I mentioned earlier, the ergonomics—namely for weight and eyestrain—just aren’t there.