In this episode, we will explore what Patryk and Wojciech have on their desk for fun and profit. And maybe they will even lift the veil of secrecy of what is hiding under their desks 😱 Socking news!
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Hello wonderful listener! Today you're listening to a new episode of the Brains and Beards show, where Patryk and Wojciech discuss programming, building teams, workflows and everything else that it takes to deliver great mobile applications.
In this episode we'll talk about the "everything else" part. We're gonna discuss our setups that we have for doing our daily work. And hopefully you will find some ideas how to improve yours, or at least it's gonna be entertaining.
Enjoy!
Hey Patryk, great to hear from you. Hello everybody. So yeah, today we have a bit of a different episode.
It's a work from home programmers edition of "What's in my bag?", "What's your daily carry?", like a lot of those shows on YouTube.
I don't know about you, but actually I like to watch them. I find it entertaining to see what other people use to perform their work.
Yes, it's totally entertaining, but for me it's dangerous. I have sometimes then a problem with restraining myself from buying some usually unnecessary stuff. Actually there is a strategy for this that we talked about privately, not on a podcast some time ago. I'm just gonna share it. Oh yeah. Some kind of disclaimer to stop people from buying stuff unless they need it. What works for me to stop myself from buying unnecessary gadgets. When I think that they would be a cool thing to get, I put them on a wish list and I cannot buy them earlier than a month later. And most of the time, like I know 90%, after a month I'm not that excited anymore and I just delete it from the list instead of buying it.
Or if I still like it, it's a perfect idea to give somebody who's asking what they should get me for Christmas or whatever occasion comes up. So yeah, I keep list of that and actually most often things just get deleted, not bought. Yeah, I have the same. My is called, I think, "shopping backlog list" or something like that. It works very well. First recommendation, don't buy anything we talked about without putting it for a "quarantined list" before. Yes, great one. Knowing you, you have a lot more interesting stuff that you use in daily work than I do.
So how about how we go take turns? You say one thing, I say one thing and you start.
Okay, some of the things are connected, so it will be hard to just jump after one thing, but we can do something like that. We led to groups then.
Let's do the groups. Okay, so I would say, first of all, I have a mess on my desk, so I have to kind of now distinguish between the current mess, which will be cleaned up for sure soon, hopefully.
And other, let's say, mess, which stays always here and is actually not a mess, but slightly too many things which I usually need on my desk. So I would group them in the working setup, let's say podcast setup and health setup group.
So perhaps I would start with the health part.
So what I'm doing for the health is using the standing desk, because basically sitting down is what's killing our civilization, I would say, or at least developer's part of it.
So sitting down is bad. Probably you heard about this, it's nothing new, but what I can't do is just standing up because I have to be very cautious to stand straight, otherwise I just slouch. Is that the right word? Basically, I lean on one of my arms and then I'm totally crooked and I get back pains from it. So my solution to this, I'm working when I'm programming and during meetings as well. At least some meetings where the people don't feel it totally strange that somebody is working.
So I have a working part, I think that's the name of it. I think it's for Xiaomi, I don't remember it, and I work in slow pace, around three kilometers per hour on it every day.
And this gives me first of all the stability because when I walk, I have to be straight, I cannot walk crooked. And the other thing is that I'm just burning additional calories, which is always good for me. And this is like, so I have standing desk from Ikea, it's a very old one, still works, I had to repair it once, but it works, I don't need anything more fancy. And this working part which somebody recommended on the internet and it really works, no problem so far. I have it for several months, half a year, perhaps more than half a year already and no zero problems so far. Do you also walk during programming or just during meetings? During programming as well, but it took several weeks to be adjusted in the way that first of all you were feeling that the display is shaking too much.
And the other thing is that it was a little bit harder to concentrate, to focus, and now it's fine. I can totally, I have no problems. Okay, I sweat a little bit more, that's sometimes, that's the only problem, but I don't think it's a big problem. And I prefer the benefits and the sweating is not a huge deal breaker to me. In the relative department, on my side, I also have an Ikea standing desk. One thing that I would change there is I originally wasn't sure whether I'm going to use it much. Actually, no, I was pretty sure I'm going to use it much, I wasn't sure if I'm going to change the position much. So I got the cheaper one with the crank, so you have to mechanically move it up and down. Usually I lift it for meetings, and then after some, because I prefer to take the meeting standing, and afterwards I work standing until I get tired, which is when I move it down and sit down. If I would be buying one now, I would buy it with the electrical engine that can move up and down because it's just easier. That's the part which broke for me.
But no, no, what broke was the power supply, and Ikea changed the suppliers for the power supply, and once after half a year of not working, they sent me the part and since then it works perfectly. But I cannot lower it because of the working part below, so it's always for me standing and working.
I don't use a working part, but when I have meetings that are one-on-one, I often take them without camera. And I walk around the flat and get my hands busy over folding laundry or get my legs busy on a trick board. It's a balancing board that you can use to... well, you just try to balance on a piece of wood that is on a cylinder. It's low, like low cognitive effort, so I can focus on the meeting. At the same time, it's like physically engaging enough that it makes sense to do it. I'm gonna go for a move to a different category.
So working machine, well, we have to work on MacBooks because we built iOS apps, and basically unless you want to have a Mac mini server locally to build your stuff, like your content, to use the stuff from Apple. I use a MacBook because I take it away sometimes when traveling and work from different places. It's a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the one with the steel with the touch bar, but I don't mind. It has a real escape key, so that's all I need. That's an M1. I feel it's perfectly fine for building mobile apps. The build times. I remember when I switched, the build times were much faster. And now they are totally fine. I don't feel any need to upgrade. What about you, Patryk? I have two things here, two computers. One is my iMac Pro from 2017, which I really love. The problem is that it starts to freeze in the worst kind of moments, and I have very strong suspicions that it's because of Zoom. I want to format it to use it again, to keep using it basically, because I don't have any secondary displays. For me, I have as well MacBook Pro, but I don't have any display for it, so I have to work on a small screen. And iMac is just perfect because it's everything. It's set up.
It has a beautiful screen, and it works very fast. I want to recover it for working purposes.
I see that my MacBook Pro M1 is faster in many things, like for example, building Android. I saw it much faster. Maybe I will buy a second display for it and use it as my main machine.
This is the iMac which I love, which right now is not very reliable. And then is the MacBook Pro, which I love as well because it's nice and everything works, and it has amazing sound speakers.
Then I use the Planck keyboard from ZSA. It's my second keyboard from them.
I built myself as well a keyboard, but right now I'm using these ones from them.
And the mouse of choice is the Logitech G403.
And I think that would be my working setup. Apart from it, I have as well a pen and a notebook. I like taking some notes in the old way, and I like nice pens. I have a fissure pen, the space one, which was used in the space station. It has a very special mind inside, which allows you to write upside down or underwater, or these kind of things. Which I don't use, but I appreciate the technology and the engineering behind it. What is very important for my work is I have a Rubik cube, which I use to distress myself or something like that. Sometimes when I'm tired or something like that and have to focus on the meetings, I'm solving the Rubik cube. It's kind of relaxing for me. I think that's the working setup. Do you know how to solve it? Yes, I know how to solve it. I remember my parents had one and I enjoyed solving it, but I never ever in my life managed to finish it. Do I understand how I solve it? No, I don't. But I know how to solve it in the way that there are algorithms which you apply and then you have solved Rubik cubes. That's what you say. For me, cognitive low impact exercise is like the spinners.
People have this, I have the Rubik cube. It's the same. But I enjoy how it moves. It's just cool for me. But I don't understand how I solve it. I just can't do it. And only in one way, there are very advanced algorithms where the people are using to solve it in 2 seconds, 3 seconds. I cannot do that. Ok, what about you? When you're getting a second display to use with your MacBook, I have a recommendation because I'm using LG 32 inch display. It's a 4K display and it's great. The leg is not in the middle. It's a bit on the side. It's very easy to move it, to pivot it into vertical position if you have really long files with a lot of lines of code to work with.
It's very nice to move around. It does not visually clutter my desk with the stand because it's just connected somewhere in the corner of the desk.
I like it. It's the 32UN880-B model, which I bought probably 2 years ago. They don't offer them anymore. But I think they were so popular enough that they for sure they have a successor.
Yeah, other than that, I have input devices that I use. I have the MX Master 3S mouse. It's like a Disorganised mouse from Logitech. And my Moonlander keyboard from ZSA. If I would be buying it now, I would probably go for the newest Shiniest thing, Voyager. Because the only thing that bothers me about the Moonlander keyboard is it has those normal size profile keycaps. I like low profile keyboards. But on the other hand, I need to use ergonomic keyboards because otherwise my wrist hurts. Moonlander is not as pleasurable to type on as Voyager could be. I've been using it for almost a year and I don't have any problems with my wrist.
And also there is great software to program it. I use the Homero modes to have multiple functions on the keys depending on whether you press them for a long time or just tap them once.
And stuff like this. So NF is a shift for me as well if I hold it and J the same. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I think a good way of getting into it, you could configure Homero modes using Karabiner software on Mac and see how it works. There's something we have to play around with the settings to be comfortable when it's a shift and when it's a letter. But now we're coming into what's in my computer. That's another episode, I think.
Yeah, but this one's technically on the ZSA. It's actually pretty cool because it's done. You configure it and then you download firmware onto the keyboard itself. So it's behavior of the keyboard. It's not behavior of the software on your operating system. So wherever you plug it, it behaves the same. So that's cool. Yeah, ZSA is a solid company and solid keyboard. All of them are really cool. I think we together have all of them apart from the newest one.
The only problem is that they ship from USA, I think, and you have to pay taxes and VAT or something, which hurts because it's already expensive and then it's a problem.
They could have like logistic centers in Europe, like other companies, just to avoid this. It's not from the US. I think it's from Taiwan. Oh, true, true, true. I don't think I was slapped with the customs on it. But you can. I was twice, so you should be. Oh, let's say it's a lottery. Yeah, if you manage not to pay school, but I had to pay twice. My last input device is I use DaVinci Speed Editor and it's for editing of this podcast, for example, I used to edit the podcast. I used to edit some movies for our YouTube channel. So some private stuff. I wasn't sure whether it's actually useful, but the difference between getting a DaVinci Resolve license and the keyboard with the license was small enough that they decided it's worth a shot. And it sped up my workflow significantly. If you're using DaVinci Resolve anyway and you would like to get faster in it, then I think it's a good bet. They also have a bigger keyboard. They have many keyboards that go in thousands and thousands of euros, some of them. Sorry, they have another keyboard that I considered from the from the range that I would I might get. But the speed editor is small enough that it actually sits for me between the two parts of my Moonlander. So it's the whole the whole command center there. It's very, very comfortable.
One more thing that plugs into the.
Actually, there are more things that plug into the computer, but one that I quickly mentioned without going much into details. There's this minor hack that I used to get around the fact that when you buy Apple devices, the amount you pay for for extra disk space is ludicrous. Like it's it's a huge amount comparing to what you get. So usually I buy the minimum that I that I would need on the computer itself and then store data on a portable SSD drive because the speeds that we get with those drives nowadays. If you make sure to get the first one, it's perfectly fine even for like editing editing photos or editing video that is on an external drive. So I'm using a portable drive from Western Digital, I think, W.D. But yeah, I bought it some time ago, so it doesn't matter what model it is. They're faster ones. And also I use those Samsung T4, T5. There's this series they have.
And yeah, it's a great value for money. They're super comfortable to use fast. I actually don't like this idea. I had it in the past and I thought it's cumbersome to me. So I prefer to buy one terabyte. This is the one which I never filled up the brim.
And I don't like to carry care about external hard drive with data. I prefer it on my on my notebook.
Because sometimes you don't even have enough USB ports to connect everything I need to connect. And I don't want to shuffle it around. I do from time to time connect the time machine. I have a local time machine, external hard drive.
I build it myself. I come by the shell and put Samsung 970 Evo Plus. That's the NVMe M2 disk. This is like super fast things that you have in the desktops. The only problem is it overheats. Sometimes it gets broken. I already burned one.
But now I'm doing it a little bit different.
But yeah, I prefer my strategy is to have enough hard drive on the computer. I don't buy the computers often enough that it would matter me. If I would buy a computer every year or every two years then perhaps. But yeah, as I said, I use iMac from 2017, which is still fine for me. So I use computer for a long time. So I prefer to spend on the internal hard drive. I was thinking that if I would be buying now, for me probably one terabyte would be the minimum. Because I have 500 gigabytes right now. And the Steam game library I have on an external drive. And a lot of photos of mine I have on an external drive and all the videos that I need to work on as well. Because I just don't fit it in. I think once you set up the React Native development environment with iOS and Android, it already is like 120 or something like this. I don't have all the photos locally as well. For me, right now, I have like a rough, I think 60% of one terabyte. And that's okay for me. I piggyback on your DaVinci stuff. So I can tell a little bit about my podcast setup, which I really, really like because it is just... I press one button, the button turns from red to green and I know everything is gonna be fine. Which we cannot always say about your podcast setup. Yes, that is true. I think episode number 15 was recorded on the wrong microphone. I thought I'm mostly currently on a different one. Patryk says editing skills saved it. And some AI magic as well. It's not all of mine. So what I'm using to record the podcast is mostly from one company. I think the name is Road from Australia, I would say. So I have a Procaster, which is the microphone from them,
which is really nice because it doesn't pick up a lot of noise. I had a condenser microphone in the past and I thought it's gonna be so great, but my environment is so noisy. So this is a dynamic microphone, which means that if I'm speaking close to it, the noises from the environment basically are not recorded, which is pretty cool. I have it on the boom, which is well from Road, but I don't like it. The boom is what helps the microphone in the air.
And then the cable goes into the cloud lifter, which is probably something which you don't know if you are not into two microphones or podcasts recording. So cloud lifter is something which amplifies the gain of the microphone.
So basically, again, it's about not picking up too much noise from around and noise from the whole setup, but record a clean voice. So this is what improves the pickup of the microphone basically. So I can record more quiet and therefore the super quiet noises from somebody in the next room are not recorded. So the cloud lifter goes into a road. No, what's the name of it? Where is the name?
The name was there, but when it's recording, it's not showing. I think it's a podcaster. So podcaster is like a multi channel recording device, which has this one. I have it only because of this big button, which turns from green to red when I press it. And basically it records everything. And from there, I can export a podcast. And we were trying to do other things. I can do many, much other things on it, like play music when I press a button, but we don't use it. And I could record like somebody calling on the phone via Bluetooth. It's very powerful and for sure I don't need it. But right now, in the past, they didn't have any other options. And this was the most user friendly one. And today you can buy a tiny one just for two channels. It's stand for four channels. Oh, no, I have even eight channels or something like that. So you can buy a very tiny version, which would take much less space on the desk. And this is what I would buy.
If you want to have like a hassle free setup for the podcast that you're sure that is recorded fine and nothing breaks. And you don't have to repeat recording of the podcasts or anything else. I can totally recommend the whole setup. My podcasting setup is total opposite. I have a gorilla setup when I lock myself in the wardrobe and I use a shotgun mic from my camera. And the camera has a tripod for the shotgun mic and I plug it into my MacBook to record it. But I have a couple of tools that I like to use for video calls to work. Well, basically, I always take the calls in my Jabra headphones and I use an external Logitech webcam for the video. It's for two reasons. One, it's better than the one I get in my MacBook. And the second reason I can position it in a better way because it's not that somebody's looking from down on your desk up your nostrils. But you can put it on the display where it's actually more or less eye level. So it's much more natural. I'm thinking of setting up some kind of boom arm or a tripod or something like this to put a light because now that the winter is coming. Like if I get a natural light through the window, it's OK. But for the winter, I probably will set up some lights when it's dark to not look like I'm calling from inside of a dungeon.
Maybe even set up my camera to use it for as a webcam. We'll see. We'll see. Don't forget this idea of using your iPhone as a camera. Yeah, true. The only thing is that I don't have a good place to hang it. I don't. Well, because they said, oh, you can hang it on the on your, you know, MacBook Pro hinge. But that looks strange to me.
I want to try it out, but I don't know where to put it because the easiest way to is to put it down. But then, as you say, you have the word that the unfavourite view of your nose inside of the camera.
But this should be improved quality.
Well, it's basically if you have already iPhone, then it's for free. Right. So it could be a good thing to try out. I'm definitely going to look into it and and yeah, and mounting some kind of light that it's unobstructive. Two last things that are usually on my desk. One is a permanent feature because it's a knitted llama because I love I love llamas. So my my wife knitted for me. And the second thing, which is kind of llama connected, is a capo vierba matte.
Anything to to add, Patryk?
No, I have some printed photos. I like printed photos. I have some from my family, which are some funny, funny things of my children, something like that, which brings me smile always when I look at it.
And I think that the rest is just a mess. We don't record video for this podcast, so I can just tell you that when I ask Patryk if there's anything to add, he started looking around very carefully, if there is anything on his desk from behind the mess that he forgot to mention.
Patryk, I enjoyed this conversation. I hope our listeners enjoy it as well. If you did, let us know if it's something you're interested in, some more developer life snapshots from the way we work and the way we stay productive. Or you would rather us focus more on strictly technical tips around our own mobile apps, our own React Native and around the work we do at Brains and Beards. We would be probably as interested in making an episode about what's on our computer, but this could be a very lengthy podcast, I afraid. So perhaps we would have to plan it in. Yeah, it would be like, I know, two and a half hour episode. I think it would have a 25 minute section on VPNs only. Yes, yes, I have to. Another 20 minutes email clients, browsers, usually half an hour. What's the extension you have in the VS Code?
Oh my god, yeah, that's an episode in itself. Perhaps a bad idea. If you're listening to it and you think some of it would be particularly interesting for you, let us know and maybe we'll do one of those lighter episodes when we dive into our niche hobbies of collecting software.
Thank you for listening to the episode. Thank you. And have a great day. Enjoy. Bye-bye.
Till the next one. Bye.