This Is My $8000 Coding Office Setup

Tom Smykowski
8 min readAug 22, 2024

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.

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Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.