This Is My $8000 Coding Office Setup

I went too far. Literally I have to walk from one edge of displays to another. Maybe I should have stopped at a single laptop…

When I’ve started by work as a software engineer I had a custom PC with a quite large screen at that time. Don’t remember how large it was but quite big. Of course not so big as today’s displays.

In the work I used an office laptop. Looking down on it wasn’t too comfortable. I had to listen to the music on my headphones all the time because of a loud server behind my back. It was bad.

Later I’ve started to work from home, on my laptop. But this time I wanted to do something about it.

So I’ve piled some books about Java and put the laptop on top of them and hooked a mouse and keyboard. It was an improvement I liked.

This setup served me for many years. It looked like that:

Just joking 😊 I don’t have a photo of that particular setup.

For years I was able to code on one display. That’s why I think it’s not necessary to have more. But of course why not upgrade if you can.

At some point I’ve hooked an external display to my laptop and started to work on such setup.

I’ve tried having them side by side like this:

However I switched to having the second monitor above the laptop. It was more convinient. Less neck moves.

I’d say in many ways such setup is perfect. It doesn’t take more space so it’s great if you don’t have too much of a real estate and money. A decent used monitor can be bought for pennies.

One and only thing to look after is to make sure the display is not burned out. Perfectly comparing it with a white piece of paper. It’s hard to spot display that burns out while you use it if you don’t use a sheet of paper. And burned out display is bad for your eyes.

The setup mentioned served me long and good. Can’t complain about it. But lately I got more space and I’ve decided to extend…