Instead of the traditional ‘hello world’ post, I thought it might be more useful to share my home office setup. I have a strange fascination with photos of other people’s workspaces, so I thought I could start off with mine.

environment

At the beginning of May, my girlfriend and I moved in together, and we’re now sharing an office. The idea was to have a shared quiet space with a door that closed; unfortunately, the doorknobs are original to this 84-year-old house, and the one to this room fell off the first time I closed the door. (I was very briefly stuck inside the room, but my toolbox was also in here at the time, luckily.) I’ll get around to fixing it at some point. In the meantime, the cats come and go as they please.

furniture

My desk is a Wayfair find. I like the hutch and L-desk combo. My previous experience with an L-desk was a glass-and-metal one that didn’t work well for me, but this one is a lot nicer to work on. After a couple of months, it is a little wobbly, and I’m considering a more solid piece with a wall-mounted shelf instead of the attached hutch.

The chair is from Autonomous, and it works fine. It can recline and has a fold-up footrest, but I never use these because I try not to spend time at my desk outside of work hours.

hardware

I upgraded my keyboard recently. It’s one of Logitech’s newer mechanical line, in a small form factor with low-profile keys. I have issues with wrist pain in my dominant hand, and I usually have to be careful with keyboards–previously, I gravitated towards keyboards with flat keys, usually membrane keyboards. So far this keyboard hasn’t caused a wrist pain flare-up, and the quiet tactile switches are quiet enough that they don’t bother anyone else who’s worked with me in the office (so far).

The mouse is a matching MX Master 3. I get a good bit of use out of the horizontal scroll wheel when zooming around Figma files.

I like that I can use both of them pretty seamlessly with my personal computer on the same desk.

Since moving in, my connection on Zoom calls has been a little touch-and-go, which I’m guessing has to do with having cinderblock walls between here and the router. So, I finally invested in a wifi repeater. It pretty much just worked with my router, maybe because I stuck with the Netgear brand. The ability to connect via ethernet is nice, and even though I was skeptical, I have noticed a speed and stability boost.

bag

After starting at Mozilla last year, I went from a Tom Bihn medium cafe bag to a Maruman Sketch backpack. The Tom Bihn bag would have probably lasted the rest of my life, but my new work laptop was too large at 16”. I generally prefer a messenger-style bag, but at my height they start looking really silly at a certain size, so I decided a new backpack was the way to go. I’m really happy with it - the entirely separate laptop sleeve compartment closest to the back is a good feature, I don’t worry about my work machine getting scuffed without having a case on it.