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

Hi, I’m Sky. I’m a student, content creator, and self-taught developer. I study IT in college, making content focusing on programming and my journey to become a better developer. I primarily code in Go or Typescript.

Outside of my work I enjoy spending time with friends, taking my dogs out for walks, reading, discussing politics, and discussing various other topics such as TV shows and movies.

What hardware do you use?

The center of attraction on my desk is my dual monitors, a 32” MSI monitor and a 27” LG monitor. Both screens are connected to my Thunderbolt dock, which connects to my Lenovo laptop.

Although the laptop is normally just kept at my desk and used as a desktop, it’s too big, heavy, and noisy to take out. When I leave the house, I take out my Asus Zenbook 14. But no matter if I’m at my desk or out and about, I normally have my Moonlander with me. Using a normal keyboard without my custom layout feels archaic now, and my Moonlander helps me to get work done much quicker. For my mouse, I use the Razer Viper. I also have a BENQ Halo lamp to help light up my desk and behind my monitor when I’m working at night or early winter mornings.

And what software?

Most software I use is free and open source, so it should come as no shock that I daily drive Linux. My flavour of choice is Nix. The reasoning behind this is that I like the declarative nature; I don’t have to worry about keeping my two computers in sync, and it’s so much better than how I did things before. I use a variety of other tools inside of Linux itself that enable me to get my work done.

• Obsidian—I’ve tried out almost every form of note-taking software, and I’ve found that Obsidian does everything I need while also keeping things in plain Markdown, which helps to keep things simple if Obsidian ever goes and also makes writing scripts around Obsidian simple.
• Neovim—I don’t normally use the Obsidian app itself; instead I prefer to use Neovim and use the obsidian.nvim plugin to interact with Obsidian. I also use Neovim for all my coding, as I enjoy its keyboard-driven design and how I can customise every little bit to fit my needs.
• DaVinci Resolve—I’ve not got too much to say about Resolve other than it works great and allows me to get my work done.
• GIMP—Same can be said about GIMP as Resolve: It just works and allows me to get my work done.

If you want to find more information about my software, you can find it on my .dotfiles repo.

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

Before I even got my Moonlander I had been using a custom version of Dvorak, and as it’s integrated into my muscle memory, I carried the layout over to my Moonlander. The layout is called Real Programmers Dvorak, and it differs from normal Programmer Dvorak by placing some keys in a position I find much more logical. I had issues getting this layout to work on my Moonlander originally, as with Oryx I couldn’t assign a key to have a different behaviour when pressing shift, so I had to use QMK and flash it to the board.

You can find my layout on GitHub. While it may look complicated, once you’ve read the docs and looked around it for a few minutes, it’s not too hard to understand what’s going on.

What would be your dream setup?

If you asked me this a few years ago I would have given you 500 ideas, but honestly I’m not sure what else I would like to add right now. The main thing I can think of is a proper desktop PC that I’ve built myself. I’d also love to try out the Voyager—the small design seems super cool and sounds like a dream for travel. But other than that, hardware-wise I’m quite happy with things at the moment.

Software-wise I would love to see more apps come to Linux, and a tighter integration between apps that I can easily script to make my life easier. But I’m mostly happy with things right now.