The people who use our boards.

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

My name is Woodson Miles. I’m the manager of the DevOps team for a defense contractor in Colorado. My team is responsible for writing the software that packages application code and delivers it into production environments. My daily responsibilities include writing code, reviewing merge requests, and setting a vision and pattern for the rest of my team.

Outside of work, I look after my two children and rabbit, play video games, and post to a Christian apologetics Substack. My one-year-old and three-year-old are so happy when the weather is nice that they spend most of their time in the back yard. I share an office with Walter, my Holland Lop rabbit, who spends most of the day between my feet, begging for pets.

Yes, Walter is litterbox trained. Rabbits are the third most popular pet in the United States after cats and dogs. Keeping rabbits in cages is a holdover from when they were mostly treated as game, but they're generally much happier when not in a cage. Their digestive system works differently, closer to a cow than a cat or a dog. It’s constantly running, which means that maybe 20% of his pellets end up outside of the litter box because he can’t control it. But his droppings are very clean. Rabbit scat is a cold fertilizer, which means it doesn’t contain dangerous bacteria that would require a composting period before it could safely be applied to plants.

My wife, Sarah, runs a local nonprofit, A Daughter’s Journey, which hosts an annual father-daughter dinner and dance in Colorado Springs. I help Sarah with her event by writing the software that manages their seating charts. I volunteered for the task expecting a simple script to suffice for the problem, but finished the year with a program that deals with natural language processing, bin packing optimization, and graph theory, which is more algorithmically sophisticated than anything I’ve ever made for work, haha!

I enjoy playing video games made by FromSoftware, the makers of Dark Souls and Elden Ring. When I want to get away from the keyboard, my wife and I will play Go, the world’s oldest continuous cultural tradition.

Sarah and I host church at our home. It’s a cozy, intimate environment that has proven a good fit for those who have difficulty finding a place in conventional church settings, such as myself. Our church has attracted thoughtful, eccentric people who are not afraid to ask challenging questions about Christianity. My Substack allows me to respond to those questions with the careful research that such questions deserve.

The church format is very informal. There is no pastor, though several members are ordained in different traditions. We are more like peers exchanging notes than teachers and students. We share a meal, sit in the living room, have tea, and anyone is welcome to share a religious topic or question, of whatever nature: therapeutic, hermeneutic, philosophical, apologetic, etc. We discuss as a group, drawing from the Biblical and extra-Biblical sources each knows best.

A common criticism I receive is that this sounds more like a Bible study than a church. I can understand where this comes from. I in no way disparage institutional churches. They play an important role. But those who would reduce my church to Bible study are at risk of doing the same to the first-century church, which also met in one another’s homes and shared meals. Our church is Christian, but it is regularly attended by atheists, agnostics, and Buddhists who would like to learn about Jesus, but do not feel comfortable in a conventional church setting.

What hardware do you use?

I have a custom-built desktop, an ultrawide monitor, a VariDesk desk converter, and of course my Voyager keyboard and Navigator. The VariDesk allows me to stand or sit. I prefer the VariDesk’s mechanical springs to the slower electric motor you see in similar setups. I’m at my computer for usually ten hours a day, so slight variations in posture make a big difference.

My Voyager and Navigator play a similar ergonomic role by reducing the strain on my shoulder caused by flexing out my arm to move my mouse. I used to have debilitating shoulder pain, but that has gradually gotten better thanks to this setup and daily back exercises over the last seven years.

Because I share my office with my rabbit, I have to be fastidious with my cable management so that he doesn’t nibble a cord.

The plants in my office, in addition to being pleasant to look at, regulate the temperature of the room and clean the air.

And what software?

My software setup prioritizes speed, style, and ergonomics, but has a significant learning curve. I run Omarchy, an omakase distribution based on Arch Linux and the tiling window manager Hyprland. It’s a stylish, keyboard-first, developer-focused operating system that embraces Linux rather than trying to copy Windows or Apple. I code with Neovim, a fast, lightweight, and mouseless text editor.

I colocate my configurations with GNU Stow, which allows me to easily version control my setup with Git and transfer them to other computers. One of the great joys of working in Linux is discovering that many of our problems have been solved long ago by simple Linux/GNU tools. Stow is one of those diamonds in the rough.

“There’s a minor meme among devotees of Unix and its modern-day derivatives that ‘Unix is an IDE,’ meaning that the tools available to developers on the terminal cover the major features in cutting-edge desktop IDEs with some ease.” —Arabesque

Omarchy also comes with OpenCode installed, which is convenient for integrating large language models into my workflow. Finally, Arch is a great choice for gaming because Steam, the most popular PC gaming platform, built their operating system on Arch. Hyprland uses Wayland, a newer display server protocol than the old X11, which does cause hiccups with many games. But I have found that with AI, these problems are easy to troubleshoot in a few minutes. And Hyprland’s style is worth that trade-off.

My dictation app, Voxtype, also came as part of the Omarchy stack and is available from a keyboard shortcut. It’s far from perfect, but it uses AI to guess based on context. It even adds punctuation. It’s best suited for natural language. I use it for email, texts, and messaging. It’s really helped ease the transition to a new keyboard layout.

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

My Voyager has the neutral dot keycaps, which is great for my alternate layout based on Canary. Canary moves more common letters to the home row, among other improvements. I use home-row mods, which allows me to treat the home row as modifier keys when held down. That reduces strain from chording. The numpad layer makes typing numbers so much faster. I also really love the caps WORD utility.

Changing from QWERTY has taken a lot of practice, but I figured if I was going to expend the effort of learning a new layout at all, I might as well go all out.

What would be your dream setup?

For the most part, I have my dream setup right now, haha! If I had to change something, maybe I would switch out my IKEA desk for something nicer, and with more space for the many books that I have stacked up. This last year I have taken the plunge into the hardware and software that I always wanted, but was too intimidated by the time and learning they would require. Now that I’ve made that jump, every day, just by going about my usual business, I get to learn a little bit more about how Linux works under the hood, and I get incrementally faster at typing on my keyboard, slowly approaching my QWERTY speed. Until then, Voxtype is my best friend.