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

My name is Tania, and I’m a software engineer at Google. I currently work on the Dine Out team at Google, which really combines two of my favorite things: food and eating out! Outside of work you’ll usually find me either at home cooking (or eating/thinking about food) or somewhere outdoors—hiking, backpacking, snowboarding, etc. I always try to fill my weekends with activities so there’s never a dull moment :)

What hardware do you use?

My work-from-home setup includes a 16” Macbook Pro, two 27” monitors (I like one horizontal and one vertical), a trackball mouse, my trusty ErgoDox, a web camera, a Bluetooth speaker, and finally a nice pair of noise-cancelling headphones. This is all housed on a small standing desk I bought at the start of the pandemic. If I were in the office, I’d swap out the laptop for my desktop (which I currently remote into from my laptop) and ditch the web camera and speaker, but everything else would pretty much remain the same. My desk would be much larger, though…

And what software?

Google software, of course ;)

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

I really like hot keys. My favorite button is the “Meh” button that I’ve bound to a bunch of actions in IntelliJ. Less buttons to press = better ;)

As for my layout, it’s pretty normal, though I’ve chosen the most comfortable place for me to press certain extraneous keys. Fun fact: When I broke my wrist snowboarding a couple years ago, I remapped my ErgoDox so that one side of the keyboard would magically change into the other side with just one keypress (using a new layer). I got pretty good at typing like this. It was really critical for me to keep my other hand in an ergonomic position (I have had some issues with RSI in both of my wrists) so not having to do weird things to accommodate my other hand was the best solution at the time!

What would be your dream setup?

Huh, no one’s ever asked me this before. I like my stationary setup a lot. I think my dream setup would be mobile, though. I unfortunately really need all my ergonomic equipment to be comfortable and can’t work long stretches on just my laptop like a lot of my peers do. I really wish I could!