I don’t know…someone needs to do Real Tech Workstations of Orange County or something because all of these setups seem very clean and perfect. My desk is a mess which I’ll clean up when I have a moment or something like that.

These desks are very nice, but they are not for me. I don't so much have a computer, as the computer has me, I just happen to occupy the same room as the computer at times. Once, my workstation sat in a different room from me, but I have since put it inside a custom built arcade cabinet that sits on the other side of the room from where I sit. I have a long desk, with many monitors of varying sizes and orientations elevated on suspsension arms along wiht multiple laptops sat on dedicated holders. I have a second desk for guests/visitors/different work, and a desk for electronics work that is currently in the process of being rebuilt. Lots of storage in the form of cabinets with thousands of carefully labelled drawers of varying dimensions - generally the dimensions of an individual drawer remains the same, but the dimensions between drawers varies, though these rules don't always apply as I subscribe to the idea of D Space which is a lower, more fundamental level of existence than L Space that the Librarian occupies. Cable management is more of a suggestion. The amount of cabling all together is thicker than two obsolete Java technical books and wrapped up in velcro straps tighter than your bum knee after leg day. I go on tidying up sprees when I need to step away from the code, unfortunately that can sometimes mean my room looks like a hyperactive six year old brought his pet tornado into the electronics supply closet for a day.

There are a couple of tricks I've figured out.

There's room in your setup for asymmetric screens. I currently have three 24" monitors set up side by side, with a much smaller 7" screen underneath, showing Grafana dashboards. At one point, I actually had two of the 7" screens. I also briefly had a "horse blinder" style 17" monitor at the side of my setup, because I worked adjacent to the hallway and didn't like seeing people coming towards me.

Bread tabs make great cable holders. PCI slot covers make great headphone rests.

Throwing a single switch to shut the whole desk off when you're done is immensely satisfying.

In the olden days, I didn't let the two big, boxy CRT monitors on my desk run me out of space. CRTs make great tables. At one point, I strapped an FM radio, TV tuner, and a small digital clock on top of one.

Biggest desktop organization hacks

- Asymmetric desk

  - Shift your workspace to your non dominant hand side. This frees up space for reference material, and for writing on your dominant hand. When I previously worked on site, it was also a great place for having other engineers bring their laptop to sit next to me while we were working together.

  - You can 3d print rails for a laptop so you can mount it under your desk

  - You can purchase under desk mounts for large desktops. I have two computers under my desk. One gaming pc and my work macbook.

  - You can also 3d print mounts for things like dacs, and amps to save even more space

  - As above I switch between my work and gaming pc with a switch

  - Keyboard maestro + activate application + 1 / 3 splits of windows is all you need on a decently sized monitor: 27 - 32. Being able to hit hyper key + letter to bring up or hide an application makes viewing things trivial.

  - Bonus points if you map your 1/3 splits to keyboard maestro.

- Drill a hole in your desk in front of your keyboard

  - You can put any wires directly into the hole vs running them uncomfortably to the edge of the desk.

- Use a split ortho linear keyboard. Push your chair in as close to the desk as possible so you don't have any breaks between your elbows and the board.

- Once a week, on Friday, make time to clean your desk. Organize it for your future self, so Monday you feel good coming to execute on work.

- Make it obvious. Put things that are habit based in front of you. You'll be surprised how much easier flossing becomes by doing this.

  - Put your medication on your desk in front of you

  - Put flossing material in front of you

I find when I start worrying about what my desk looks like that I’m just procrastinating. I have noticed no correlation between my desk being messy or stylish with actual focus and productivity.

One of the finest engineers I’ve worked with has macular degeneration. His entire setup was designed to allow him to focus on the same part of his laptop screen (with a very large font), which is basically eye-level screen.

I have only ever used a monitor the first day I got to my desk because it happened to be there.

These setups strike me a bit like AWS/GCP. Just another place for devs to spend money.

And yet another excellent engineer I know uses VIM without syntax highlighting.

Fun, reminds me of https://reddit.com/r/battlestations

The second one looks ergonomically terrible. The chair has no adjustments, the desk is a writing desk and not a computer desk, and there's no proper keyboard or mouse. Surely nobody can work like that for a long time without getting injured.

Here's a twitter account that highlights a lot of similar workstations

https://twitter.com/workspacesxyz

I keep going back to a laptop with a large high-res screen, so I can use it from wherever is comfortable.

I also have a "lectern" laptop-sized standing desk on casters, which I use for every WFH meeting, and can roll around to whatever view/lighting/backdrop/noise I want.

I sometimes miss having a desktop large landscape/portrait monitor with lots of info I can refer to spatially, with my laptop in a dock to the side for comms/dashboard monitoring. I should set up a larger desk for that again.

But a comfortable tiling window manager mitigates not having huge monitors (e.g., instantly bringing info I need into view, and managing lots of info on a small screen, without fiddling with the window management). Xmonad is still better for this for me, even though I've spent a couple years trying to get an i3wm config/practices that work as well.

Actually I'm reorganizing mine, the idea is to build a 3-mode desk, one part is an on-wheel structure, just two legs and an upper part, the upper part sustain the monitor and two 5-6 rack unit side-by-side standard 19" places plus a plane to keep wired keyboard and mouse etc there.

A second detachable part is a keyboard stand to be used both in standing mode and in sit-down mode.

The third part is the sit-down part: a treadmill with a long chair on top, to allow stationary standing mode, slow march mode, sit-down one all in the same furniture.

So far I've just made few prototypes with scrap wood though...

Related: the battlestations subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/

And its various spinoffs (look in the sidebar).

How can I submit my own workstation? It's very messy but its mine :) Walking/standing/sitting desk with enormous $10,000 PC, the L-shaped desk had two matching white IKEA tabletops until one was damaged by the pressure of the multi-monitor clamps so now one tabletop is a brown MDF sheet that I got from Home Depot for $40. The walking treadmill I ripped out of a surplus deask/treadmill unit so the control panel doesn't have a complete enclosure, the circuit board is exposed --only low voltage though, gets power over a long serial cable.

This is a rather nice website. Very interesting read!

One observation I definitely can't help but make is that everyone seems to be leaning on to a rather large/high-res single monitor than juggle around 2 WQHD/FHD displays :) I definitely had more trouble focusing when I had 2 equi-resolution screens rather than 1 large and 1 small screen OR rather 1 large screen in clamshell mode.

I used to be interested in this stuff until I realized how homogenous and bland it all was. There's very little personality in any of these setups.

It's r/battlestations without the gauche RGB light strips everywhere. I give it 6 months before this is either abandoned or becomes filled with affiliate links to office furniture products.

I expected more multi-monitor setups. I feel half as productive with only one screen - how do people do it?

Makerstations※ has been great for this sort of stuff, plus they also have an 80s/90s computing vibe with their fonts and choice of imagery.

※ - https://www.makerstations.io

I also have a desk it's my lap