
Hacker Workspaces - bitsweet
http://coderwall.com/p/gxjpna
======
feral
A lot of those workspaces consist of a laptop (often 13inch macbook) on a
desk.

Laptop screens, on desks, are at the wrong height for ergonomics - you
shouldnt have to look down at the screen all day.

People should be using large dedicated monitors, which are at the right
height, and dedicated input peripherals (e.g. keyboard+mouse). Ergonomic, and
efficient.

A nice 27inch IPS display is now very cheap; I do not understand professional
hackers working just off a laptop.

~~~
cgag
Do you have a recommendation for a nice cheap IPS? I'm in the market for a
monitor, I'd be interested to see what other developers recommend.

~~~
spatular
Dell U2711 is quite nice, good IPS and anti-glare, but it's not cheap
(800-1000 USD). But in my case I consider that money well spent.

At a recent Slashdot discussion a lot of people mentioned Yamasaki Catleap, it
could be shipped from Korea where it's supposedly produced from 27'' panels
rejected by Apple, but still usable. And it costs 340-400 USD with shipping.

As for the topic, it's really puzzling how people can use just laptops as
their main work machines for code development. Right now I have about 6Mpixels
at 100dpi of screen estate and I guess I could make use of another 4Mpixels.
Good keyboard is also a must.

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courtewing
As a programmer that suffers from RSI-related wrist issues at only 26, all I
can think of when I see all of these workspaces is "how on earth are all of
these people still able to move their hands?" Most, if not all of them look
like they're _trying_ to stick it to ergonomics.

I'm secretly just jealous, of course.

~~~
Zombieball
26 y/o here with RSI-related issues as well. I constantly wonder how my +30
y/o co-workers with less ergonomically set-up workstations than I have are
able to survive.

I am also jealous! :(

~~~
jcrites
I approach all computer usage as if it's inherently harmful to my body, and I
must minimize that harm if I expect to work with them the rest of my life. I
have had excellent results avoiding repetitive strain from the following two
products:

3M Ergo Mouse:
[http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/...](http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/products/ergonomicmouse/)

Kinesis Keyboard: <http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/>

I have no relationship, commercial or otherwise, with either vendor. Just
worked well for me, as a professional software engineer. I highly recommend
them. Both are designed to shift common movements away from smaller muscles
toward larger muscles. Where a regular mouse relies on the small muscles of
your wrist, the 3M mouse shifts that movement to the larger muscles of your
arm. Kinesis moves the most common keys (space, enter, delete, modifiers) to
one's (stronger) thumbs, and places keys to avoid the "stretch" of one's hand
common with key combinations like ctrl+shift+T.

I should also mention that I use a standing desk. I think that's an important
benefit to non-harmful mouse & keyboard posture. My experience from working
while sitting in chairs is that your body tends to lean from side to side,
extend one's arms to a degree that will cause repetitive strain, or put weight
on the wrong places (like armrests). I have had an easier time adopting
correct (least harmful, according to modern ergonomics research) posture while
standing.

That posture is: let your arms fall limp to your sides. Now, bending at the
elbow (and without moving your elbow), raise your arms in front of you to be
parallel with the ground. That's where your keyboard should be. Your mouse
should be in reach by rotating your arm, again without moving the elbow. This
is the best posture for both chairs and standing (according to the ergonomics
expert paid by my company to examine my working space -- I find this to be
true in practice). As you can see, it is difficult to achieve this posture in
a chair. The height of your desk is probably wrong, and you probably need a
keyboard tray. It's more easily achieved with a standing setup.

I have had virtually no RSI issues since switching to these two products and a
standing desk about 1.5 years ago. Both devices are fairly different from a
normal input, and took a long time to learn to use effectively. The 3M mouse
trades away accuracy, but with experience you can get almost as good as a
normal mouse for regular desktop applications. I still use a regular mouse and
keyboard for PC gaming, however.

Hope this is helpful to other intensive computer-users out there! Give
standing a try -- your health will probably benefit.

~~~
dedward
It's anecdotal, and maybe it's just me, but I've been a computer junkie, at
work and at home for a good 20 years, i touch-type, somewhere in the top 5%,
my posture sucks (other than where my hands sit relative to the keyboard) and
I've had no RSI related issues that I can recall, ever. That's a mix of apple
keyboards, buckling spring keyboards, and barely tolerable dell keyboards.
(There's a few along the way I threw out because they were too mushy... but
other than that)

Perhaps it's something I do without intention - small breaks due to short
attention span or somthing...... but not everyone gets injuries.

That said - your advice is all perfectly sound.

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Rudism
After my initial switch from a single to dual monitors, I couldn't imagine
ever going back to just one. Let alone a tiny laptop display. Shocked at how
many single-laptop-and-not-much-else setups I saw in the examples given.

~~~
notJim
I tried to make the switch from dual to single monitors earlier this year.
It's really nice to only need a laptop (or one monitor + kb/mouse) on your
desk. I also find the border between the two monitors _really_ interferes with
my ability to use the space, somehow. During the experiment, the only time I
ever found myself wanting a second monitor was when I was testing in the
browser, and needed to view a whole web page, plus an inspector. Since I have
periods where I do that a lot, I now have a second monitor hooked up to my
laptop. The second monitor goes unused abou 90% of the time.

I think my ideal setup would be to have a very high-resolution display like an
Apple Cinema display.

~~~
mgcross
You're right - I just switched to a 2560w 27" (from 1920w 24") and can now fit
a browser at 1280px on the left side of the screen, and Sublime Text at 1280px
on the right. The display, ST with the SFTP plugin and LiveReload have made
much more of a difference than I imagined.

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SimHacker
Slavoj Zizek Says Your Office Ping-Pong Table Is Oppressing You!
[http://www.businessinsider.com/slavoj-zizek-says-your-
office...](http://www.businessinsider.com/slavoj-zizek-says-your-office-ping-
pong-table-is-oppressing-you-2012-5)

~~~
xtractinator
Employers disarm their employees right to complain by providing them services
for free? What an awful situation.

~~~
dsirijus
It could be an awful situation.

But, from my experience, mostly it isn't.

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pkamb
Shameless plug for my new Mac App:

EdgeCase: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?mt=12>

The app inserts cursor-bounding hard edges between your shared screen edges.
Cross only when you want to via several shortcuts.

I made it because multiple monitors make OS X hotcorners impossible for me to
hit. (Fitts' Law, infinite width, etc.)

Workspace / multiple-monitor junkies in this topic: sound useful? Have any
other multiple-monitor nits I could fix?

~~~
sneak
Great name. :)

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jperras
I've been curating a collection of hacker workspaces on and off for a year now
in a Gimme Bar collection: <http://gim.ie/ccN> . These aren't generally
workstations of "famous" hackers, but rather just people that would send me
pictures of their setup when I asked nicely.

Edit: Ah yes, there are a few in there that I pulled from a .net Magazine
article.

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Void_
Everybody is doing all their work on 11" MacBook Air these days. I feel like
people just wanna look cool.

Why? Is it the weight? Do you find Pro too heavy to carry around? Have you
tried a backpack?

~~~
zheng
I have a 13" MBA, and the reason I chose it over the pro is that it has an
SSD. I've killed hard drives before thanks to them not sleeping when I shut my
lid. But I can't do real work on it for long periods of time, I need my dual
monitors.

~~~
wtetzner
You can get an MBP with an SSD. I have a 13" MBP with a 128 GB SSD.

~~~
Void_
I have MBP with SSD _and_ HDD. :)

~~~
dekz
As do I, but it's really really heavy! It's almost consistent weight training
carrying the thing around.

~~~
Void_
Yeah I solved that issue by doing real weight training, then it doesn't feel
so heavy!

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dysoco
Can you call this guys "Hackers" ? Come on, Macbooks, Ikea tables, and the
most weird... cleanliness.

Where are the cups of coffee ? Where are all the cables ? The Model M keyboard
? I can't see any Donald Knuth books there. Not to mention no one is using
Linux there.

I'm not "ragehating" because of Macs or so, I'm just saying that it's weird to
see a Hacker with a workspace like that :P

~~~
oemera
I don't mean to be that guy but this kind of comments are getting on my nerves
lately. If you don't have something to contribute just _don't_ write an
comment. I mean think about your comment and ask yourself if it helped
someone. I would be surprised if you think yes.

A hacker is not a hacker because of the hardware he/she uses. It's not the
books he/she reads. It's about being unconventional, using things you are
productive with, finding out what would make things better and you name it.
It's not about being not clean and reading Donald Knuth's books.

Please either stop writing such things or simply go away.

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abcd_f
Nice idea, but too much clicking involved.

It should really be a name, a photo, a name of most notable/public piece of
work and a link to a personal site/about page.

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Samuel_Michon
Interesting how every single one of those people uses a Mac, even the guy who
works at Microsoft and another who worked on ASP.NET.

~~~
soup10
Bleh, I use a mac because I have to for iOS dev. But it kind of sucks for
desktops. You can choose between an under-powered mini, the far-overpriced
pro, or the ugly single monitor iMac(I like my apple branding where I don't
have to look at it, thank you).

~~~
eddieroger
For what it's worth, the iMac has been able to power a secondary screen for
quite some time. Not that's it's a great alternative - Apple has always had a
lackluster desktop line the first iMacs took off.

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Cyranix
I'm usually not among the grammar police, but leading right off the bat with
"Us developers" instead of "We developers" stuck out quite a bit. Also, the
fuzzy timestamp has a duplicated "about".

Nothing against the actual content of the page, though. Nice to see both
minimalist and elaborate styles represented.

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jboggan
I have a standing desk cobbled together from non-office supplies. My "lectern"
is a Manhasset music stand (<http://www.manhasset-
specialty.com/index.cfm?pageID=3>) adjusted to the perfect height and pitch
for my wrists while typing. The wireless mouse used to slip off until I pulled
a cotton pillowcase over the black metal, now it grips and is very
comfortable.

My monitor is just a 37" 1080p LCD stacked on a table and empty crates to
reach head height. I've got an ottoman to sit or lean on when I need a break
from standing, and the music stand desk makes it really easy to quickly and
firmly adjust the perfect typing attitude.

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boop
I use my MBP in clamshell mode: <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3131>

With a Macessity LapTuk stand: [http://www.amazon.com/Macessity-LAPTUKPRO-
LapTuk-with-USB2-0...](http://www.amazon.com/Macessity-LAPTUKPRO-LapTuk-with-
USB2-0/dp/B0047MFXL8/)

And 3 external monitors usings two Kensington's USB to VGA adaptors:
[http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Universal-Multi-Display-
Ada...](http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Universal-Multi-Display-Adapter-
Black/dp/B002F9NSMQ)

I can do a coderwall profile with photos if there is interest.

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bedris
Theory of relativity hacker workspace: [http://tobifairley.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/05/alber...](http://tobifairley.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/05/albert-einstein-desk-web.jpg)

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unfocused
Very nice site. I'm always intrigued by other people's setup, but I need a
desk and proper heigh adjustments. My wrists would die if I worked on a bed or
in a coffee shop!

If people are also interested at more in depth setups of people from various
fields, this site <http://usesthis.com> (which has been linked to from Hacker
News I'm sure) is along the same lines, minus the photo of their actual setup.
It's more descriptive.

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alexrothenberg
I love the way you can drag and drop an image into a protip. Its a really nice
user experience and also something I didn't know you could do technically.

~~~
mainevent
Couldn't agree more. Great user experience.

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jurre
I see some people use the MBA with a 27" thunderbolt display that are still
using the MBA as a secondary display and I'm wondering what you find this
useful for. I would think having the 2560*1440 would be more than enough and
not having to turn your head would be great. Especially since full screen
isn't supported in multimonitor mode in Lion (yet, i hope).

~~~
gurkendoktor
Ohmygod, this is so frustrating. I hate to work like this - I feel like the
extra monitor actually distracts me more than it frees me from a lack of
space. I've still worked like this because:

\- A magic trackpad is expensive. And when you have it, it's kind of awkward
to place it. And then you have to deal with occasional Bluetooth hiccups and
batteries and all that crap, when you basically _have_ that same thing build
into your laptop.

\- Same for the keyboard, but cheaper.

\- In 10.6, you could just close the laptop, wait for the screen to appear,
and open it again. You would be able to use keyboard and trackpad but the
screen would stay dark. Not so anymore.

\- If you close the laptop because you have a mouse and keyboard, it will run
insanely hot. I know it's officially supported, but I plan to use my laptop
more than the "supported" three years. If you open it just a little, the
screen turns back on in Lion, see previous item.

And if the screen is already there, then why not use it? It seems like the
rational thing to do.

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aristidesfl
My Workspace: <http://coderwall.com/p/ggrp8w>

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bitsweet
It might not be initially obvious that these are just some featured desks as
part of our launch. Coderwall members have been adding their desks here =>
<http://coderwall.com/p/t/hackerdesk>

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pkrumins
How I hack: <http://i.imgur.com/uh7PV.jpg>

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jebblue
I liked Ilya's and Rachel's workspaces the best.

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thechut
I can't believe every single one of these people is using a Mac...

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Zaheer
Beautiful site!!

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xtractinator
Nice advert for Apple computers.

