My capstone project is just beginning basically. I’ve been tasked to create a preliminary draft and continue to iterate a UI for the app we are making but I discussed most of my thoughts on UI in my previous post. So today, I’m going to talk about something that I interact with literally every day, unless I’m on vacation: my desk.
So there’s a lot to unpack here that’s for sure! First off, yes I have 4 monitors. I’ve found in the past few days that I don’t necessarily use all my monitors so I’m doing to down size to just 3 which should still be more than enough for my needs. In regards to the setup of 4 monitors, it took some trial and error to get to this style. I hadn’t ever had a vertical monitor before and decided that it could be of use, especially for programming, but I have yet to use it for that simply due to it being to the side. If it was in front of me it would be used a lot more than it currently is.
For what’s powering the monitors, to the right of my desk (standing desk from Fully) I have my PC hooked up. It has an AMD 3700X CPU, 32GB of RAM and the Nvidia 3070 GPU, which I had to pay an arm and a leg for in the current market where everything is way above MSRP. I built my first computer back in 2016 and slowly upgraded the components to the point where the only things from my original PC are my CPU cooler and the storage. The rest is all new and upgraded from their original.
Continuing on my desk you have my keyboard which is the Glorious GMMK Pro mechanical keyboard that I “built” a few months ago. The “built” is the fact that I didn’t have to do any soldering like I would with other keyboards, mainly because I don’t trust myself to do that as well as I don’t know how to just yet, but maybe soon. I also have a split keyboard (put away here) that I use for work where I switch up my monitors to the laptop dock input for work.
Speaking of work, you can see my work laptop in the far left of the picture where it is hooked up to a dock in order to connect to 3 of my 4 monitors for work.
I have 3 macro pads here (one on the right and 2 on the left), mainly for small macros but haven’t really thought of things to automate just yet, but I’m willing to hear any ideas you may have!
Above the monitor are 2 cameras, one for work and one for personal computer. Could have used just one but it is a pain to reconnect the cable each time I have work thus I have one for each for now. And above the left monitor is a key light which helps me stay in good lighting for my work calls.
In regards to the applications I use the most on my computer, it’s mainly the Vivaldi browser, KeePass XC for my passwords, Steam (game library), Discord, Spotify, Windows Terminal (from the Microsoft store for access to Powershell/Windows Terminal/WSL in the same window), Everything (file search that’s faster than the built-in one) and Visual Studio Code where most of my coding is done.
So that’s my setup! I’m usually found here during the day and night either doing work, doing homework, or playing video games. It’s something that I have put a lot of effort to being a place where I can be for hours on end.
Like I said above, this blog isn’t as much as a capstone post this week since I talked about my first part of the project last week, UI, but next week we should have more to talk about the project and my thoughts on the process for working through the draft process and any other part of the capstone that I do. Hope you enjoyed my post about my setup! Let me know if there’s any questions you may have about either the setup, the project or anything else in general!
-Gianluca