Hacker Stations – Tech workspace setups to get inspiration from

[poushkar]

I really like the "workspace porn" and been frequenting various blogs and communities with workspace setups. It's inspiring and interesting to see how other people organize their workspaces and achieve focus and comfort. And while it's also interesting to see random setups from people with different backgrounds, I especially like to see setups from developers and tech professionals like myself. That's why I decided to start the blog dedicated solely to such setups. I hope some HN visitors will appreciate it, too.

[MDWolinski]

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.

[xwdv]

At least you have a desk. My workstation these days is just a laptop set on whatever surface I happen to find.

[noir_lord]

Mine is clean and perfect at the start of the day, then it gets destroyed over a day or two then I clean up and and clean it and start over.

It's a good way to work tbh, resetting the environment is an effective way of getting into a productive headspace easily.

[rufus_foreman]

I know what you mean but these setups are complete messes compared to the ones at https://www.workspaces.xyz/ that someone else mentioned below (typical example: https://www.workspaces.xyz/p/177-carl-barenbrug).

I mean in most of these you can even see cables!

Although workspaces seems to be designer heavy so maybe that explains it.

I get what you are saying though. It would be fun to see if they look this clean when they don't know a photographer is coming over or if you and I are just slobs.

[criddell]

My desk gets pretty messy, but I at least try to do some cable management. Those photos have some pretty messy tangles of cables.

[justinlloyd]

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.

[citboin]

Photos, please.

[don-code]

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.

[_virtu]

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.

- Under desk mount everything. This saves space and indirectly causes your compute hardware to collect less dust.

  - 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

- USB C hub + usb switch or kvm

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

- You don't need multiple monitors, your switching technique is just wrong (if this doesn't mesh with you, that's okay, maybe I'm wrong :) )

  - 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.

- Get a face light for calls. It makes a huge difference in image quality.

- 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.

- You don't have to use your stand desk only for standing. You can also have settings for writing height so you're still sitting but you have a more comfortable setup for extended periods.

- 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

[lacksconfidence]

> - Put flossing material in front of you

This is no joke. After i put a bowl of floss picks (those u shaped things that are pre-strung) on my desk my dental hygenist made a surprised comment at the level of improvement in gum health.

[bengale]

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.

[qzw]

Yeah, I remember seeing a picture of Einstein sitting at his rather messy desk years ago. Haven’t tidied up my desk since.

[yowayb]

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.

[jrockway]

I think the money is well spent. Like, I wouldn't buy a color monitor just to get syntax highlighting, but there are no non-color monitors, so sure, I'll use syntax highlighting. (I use Emacs over an SSH session. Got italic text working a few months ago and I love it!) The rest of the things people have seem important to me; bad input devices will make your hands unusable, and you probably can't do your job after that happens, so if you sink $400 on a keyboard to be able to do your job in 10 years, that's not really a waste. Spending money on microphones and cameras means less or no money spent on commuting, because people can actually get work done over Zoom. A desk is mandatory for overcoming the force of gravity as it applies to your keyboard or laptop.

I will say, a laptop is the least important computing device I own. I have one to test builds on arm64; it's on a shelf somewhere and I SSH to it. If I'm "out and about", not at my desk, then I don't want to do any computing. Meanwhile, desktops are cheaper and more upgradeable. Need more RAM? Pop a stick in. ML training too slow? Pop another GPU in. I don't know why anyone would do it any differently. (I also have 3 monitors, 2 of which are for IMs because there are so many IM apps these days. I miss the days of having IRC inside Emacs. But bought some hardware to compensate for my friends and coworkers desire to use Discord and Slack. So it goes.)

[poushkar]

Thanks for sharing this! It's been only a few posts so far since I started the blog, but I am actually looking for persons first, and the "coolness" of a setup doesn't really matter to me. In fact, I find a laptop that moves between sofa and a kitchen table as inspiring as some intricate setups. There is something about doing more with less. And I am sure there will be people with such setups featured on the blog, as well.

[luc_]

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

[capableweb]

Most of those seem gaming related (judging by the amount of RGB light and non-ergonomic chairs at least), while "Hacker Stations" seems focused on setups for work.

[ataru]

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.

[gumby]

> Surely nobody can work like that for a long time without getting injured.

Not at all surely. Some people need that stuff and some don't. Just the luck of the draw.

I have a macbook plugged into a monitor, wireless kbd, trackpad. I use that setup about 30% of the time. The rest of the time I just use my laptop on whatever surface is near: my lap (shocker!), train or plane table, lying on the couch with the laptop on my thighs. On a plane if I have the window seat I often jam myself in at an angle and use it while twisted.

My gf thinks that is crazy: she needs an ergo mouse, special pillow on her chair, monitor at the right height etc. Her hight is a factor, also she's a parent so her carpal tunnels (and some other tendon guides) have narrowed. But she needs a neck pillow for the car as well, which I don't.

In general the physical environment is designed for people around 180 cm +/- a few. Car seats, star risers, chairs and tables... Fair or not that's how it seems to be. And luckily, I'm just a smidgen over 180.

[reustle]

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

https://twitter.com/workspacesxyz

[sah2ed]

Yes, and they even had a showing on HN recently [0].

https://www.workspaces.xyz/

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265223

[neilv]

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.

[kkfx]

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...

[klez]

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

And its various spinoffs (look in the sidebar).

[luc_]

ya beat me :P

[runnerup]

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.

[vulkan92]

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.

[rchaud]

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.

[blacksmithgu]

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

[JonChesterfield]

Basically swap what program is in the foreground on one screen at the same point you'd otherwise look at a different screen. Alt tab or whatever the keyboard shortcut is to see the docs, then again to go back to the editor.

It's slower and it's worse, but I write a fair amount of code on a laptop in hotel rooms and it works well enough. Most annoying things are probably the loss of scrolling test output on the second screen and difficulty doing multiway diff compares.

[paulryanrogers]

Super ultra wide

[jonpurdy]

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

[thdespou]

I also have a desk it's my lap