General

What do you use all of those computers for out of curiosity?

My company, Pancetera, creates software for companies to accelerate storage operations in large VMware environments.

I work at home in Boston when I am not on the road or at the office in California. When I first wrote this FAQ, I was doing about 50% of the programming at Pancetera with my co-founder doing the other 50%. We have since hired about 30 people and neither one of us does as much coding at this point (which is why I've reduced the monitors in the 2010 version of the pictures). Right now I spend most of my time working on technical direction for the company and talking to customers. I travel a lot--about 120,000 miles in the last 12 months, according to TripIt. I used to live in Silicon Valley full time, but somehow got tired of it after 5 years. Going back and forth is re-energizing and has been effective for me for the last 3 years. Virgin America, GoGo Inflight, and traveling without luggage is icing on the cake--I just grab the MacBook Air and go to the airport.

Please do not send me your résumé.

This office is over the top.

It is. But it's fun. I'm in here 60-80 hours a week during crunch time. It's way less depressing than long hours at an uncomfortable desk and phone books to boost the monitor height. Since I work at home, I don't get to play in a data center of prototypes systems, so I had to build my own small data center.

After many years of working at tables that were the wrong height, looking at small monitors, listening to loud computers, typing on vanilla cramped keyboards that hurt my shoulders, sitting in falling-apart chairs, I decided enough was enough.

Some people have over-the-top cars, I have an over-the-top office.

How big is the office?

Overall, it's about 26 x 14 ft. The vaulted ceiling is about 10 ft high. The closet is 7 x 9 ft.

What chair is that?

Herman Miller Aeron, fully adjustable. Bought used on Craigslist. If you're shopping for used Aerons, beware that they come in 3 sizes. There are also the "basic" and the "fully adjustable" models. The latter usually come with a lumbar support or a "PostureFit" support.

What desk system is that?

It's from the Bush Furniture Series C collection. From the set, the office contains the 72" bow desk, a 72" credenza, a 36" return, the 72" right-corner module, a 3 drawer free-standing pedestal, a 2 drawer attached pedestal, two 30" storage cabinets, a 36" lateral file cabinet, and a pencil drawer. I built a small "desk extension" that makes the 6ft bow desk 7 ft wide for a little extra surface. Overall, the entire desk footprint is 12 ft x 8 ft.

What keyboard tray is that?

It's a 6 ft 1x12 board from Home Depot ($10) and 4 2" L-brackets ($5?). 8 screws hold it onto the desk, though for a long time there were only 4 screws. It's very robust (no flimsy bounce when typing) and has plenty of room.

You built a cubicle in a huge room! / What is the workflow? / Do you really need so many desks?

The basic layout of the desk is an 'L' up against a 'U'. The 'L' is for task processing and brainstorming: Dealing with incoming requests, filing, and organizing happens at this desk. For filing, there are two lateral file drawers (personal and brainstorming) and a two pedestal file drawers (corporate records) within "swivel distance."

The 'U' desk is where work happens. The 'L' is more administrative: Paying bills, stacks of paper to deal with, or the infrequent meeting in the office.

Physical separation helps me stay focused. The physical separation also puts my mind into a state of knowing anything piled up on the 'L' needs to be dealt with and so aggressive use of the trash can and filing cabinets prevents accumulation of huge stacks of clutter that never get moved.

I am using David Allen's Getting Things Done model for processing tasks; I rely on the Mac/iPhone combo Things and two letter trays on my desk for "in" and "next" processing stacks. David Allen says to buy the cheapest label printer that plugs into the wall, but I splurged and spent $100 to get one that doesn't waste so much tape. I use the label printer pretty heavily on labeling files, and make it a point to keep about 500 new manilla folders ready for filing. I have also found that keeping an industrial shredder--not a cheap $20 one--helps me reduce clutter by letting me quickly destroy confidential documents. With a cheap shredder I would inevitably pile up documents to shred but never actually do the shredding.

Too much light / too loud / too hot.

Lights: The lighting is all balanced against the monitors--the monitor and ambient light are roughly equivalent. The lights are controlled via X10 and I can quickly change the lights in the room from any web browser or a physical remote control. Eye strain is very minimal.

Noise: In the office, there are only two computers--the laptop and the Mac Pro. These machines are extremely quiet. The rest of the gear is in the closet, which has a door that closes. Rubber matting reduces the resonance of the fan/disk noise across the wood floors. The Mac Pro in the office itself is on the other side of the desk from where I sit.

Heat: The temperature in the winter is about 65-75 F--by far the warmest room in the house; during the winter, window fans on timers pump cold air in from outside. In the summer, there's 2 tons of A/C to keep the office cool. The closet and the office are separate thermal zones; the closet stays at around 68-72 F and the office 72-78 F. It's very comfortable.

What about windows?

There's two pretty large windows at each end of the room and a small window in the closet. I did consider putting in skylights, but the roof outside is in very good shape and I didn't want to mess with it. I also had a very small "window" of time allocated for remodeling; only about 4 weeks to do the whole house.

There's always compromises, and it's very hard to find a house in this area of Boston with a large enough space for an office like this. Often times when I've had windows in my office, whether at home or in a corporate building, I've ended up covering them to cut down on glare. The 11 lamps + 6 can lights in the ceiling definitely provide plenty of light, even if it's artificial light.

It doesn't look like there's much shelf space.

There's 39 linear feet of bookshelves in the office, and 16 linear feet of storage shelving in the closet. There's also two storage cabinets in the office with about 10 feet of shelving that is 2 feet deep.

Monitors

Why not go with virtual desktops instead of physical screens?

I do use virtual desktops.

However, I am, generally speaking, not using virtual desktops on the big monitor machine. Sometimes I do keep 2 Spaces going when two very different coding activities are going on. But frankly, Spaces is pretty bad when you want the same application with different windows/documents in different spaces.

I've used virtual desktops heavily in the past even on my primary coding machine. Mostly I need concurrency in what I am seeing. Watching cascading crashing, seeing a few gdb sessions + code, etc. Virtual desktops don't solve the concurrent viewing. When I don't need concurrent viewing, I use tabbed terminals quite a bit.

Of course, if I couldn't afford a lot of monitors, I can work on a single 17" monitor with 8 or so virtual desktops (and have done so)--but it really sucks. This lets me get through tasks a lot faster with less pain. Debugging is painful enough as it is--there's no reason not to add as much hardware to ease the pain where possible.

Did you have to do any software tweaks [for the portrait mode displays]?

Modern Mac hardware/software supports rotation with no additional tweaks. Look in the Displays System Preferences; you can pick an orientation for a monitor (90, 180, 270 degrees).

How much do the monitor stands cost? where did you buy them?

On the desk, the monitor stands are Ergotron DS100 and Ergotron LX arms. They are very sturdy but a little expensive. Try Amazon, NewEgg, etc. I do not recommend the Ergotron Neo-Flex line. Spend a little more and get a vastly better product. (For sale: Two Neo-Flex laptop stands.)

In the closet, the monitors are mounted to the wall with $10 mounts from Monoprice. They are very sturdy, but not very flexible.

So how are the monitors driven?

The main displays are connected to the Mac Pro, which has multiple video cards. Currently it has an ATI 4870 and a 2600. In previous versions of this office, I was running 3x2600 cards.

How many monitors total?

3 x 30" on the Mac Pro
1 projector.
1 x 20" for previewing PowerPoints with my laptop.
2 laptop screens.
1 in the closet. (And about 4 others not used right now.)
1 in the basement with some loud rack-mount disks.
1 TV on the Mac Mini.
So that's 10 total in use.

What's with the projector?

I stole borrowed the projector idea from this guy. I do a lot of presentations and thought the projector would be handy--it's very portable, light, and uses an LED bulb (so no expensive $300 surprises). It was the above link that made me think it would be handy for more than just color checking of slides and rehearsing talks.

Sadly, even a cheap projector costs a lot. I couldn't justify a used one because there's so few (zero?) used LED units on Craigslist, and a used one + replacement bulb was more than a new LED unit. However, the projector screen was silly cheap--$77 at Amazon for an 80" 4:3 screen. 16:9 would be much more trendy, but less real room, given the ceiling constraints I have.

I am still exploring use cases for the projector. Stay tuned.

Don't you lose track of the cursor?

On the Mac, I turn on the big cursor (System Prefs > Universal Access > Mouse, then use the Cursor Size slider).

It's ugly, but my arm gets less tired--when the cursor was the old 16x16 size, I would shake my arm hard looking for it. Now at around 96 x 96, it's a heck of a lot better. There's a freeware Mac tool called "Screen Crosshairs" that I tried for a while, but it's ironically(?) broken on multiple monitors.

You should use [the software called] synergy!

I have in the past, but it doesn't make much sense for my current situation.

OK, it looks cool, but I bet you won't like it once you use it. / Too much neck/wrist pain.

I've been using variations of this set-up for 2 years now, and I've running 6-8 monitors for about 6 years. No neck pain, no wrist pain these days, especially with the Kinesis keyboards. Check my Flickr pictures for pictures of old offices set-ups and experiments.

I've found doing as few as 10 push-ups every day also alleviates some of the tightness and fatigue in the wrists and forearms (as well as having other good side effects). This is an unscientific observation and is not medical advice. But it helps me, so I have a yoga mat at one end of the room for when I don't make it out to the gym.

Some folks have mentioned it looks like a 'just-completed' project because it's so clean/de-cluttered. I de-clutter the office once a week. Otherwise I go nuts.

Computers

What are the specs of the Mac Pro?

8 x 2.8 GHz cores, 24 GB of RAM, two ATI video cards (a 2600 and a 4870), 3 x 30" monitors, 20 TB of storage.

The Mac Pro has a DroboPro connected over iSCSI with 12 TB of disks in it and a bootable SAS->SATA RAID with 8 TB of disks in it. I'm using an Areca 1680x SAS controller--it is fast and EFI-bootable in the Mac Pro. The external chassis is from PC-Pitstop in Missouri. The DroboPro is used for scratch space and Time Machine backups; the 8 TB is carved into RAID-6 with 5 TB logical space (1 disk is a spare). The performance of the primary storage is very good. There are no internal drives in the Mac Pro.

I can't believe you use Macs. Macs suck. You are teh loser.

I've seen this comment a few times, which is a little funny--I have dozens of Windows VMs for testing. I probably have more Windows installed here than most people hating on the Mac.

I mostly am using a Mac Pro for the main desktop because (1) a key piece of my development environment only runs on Windows and Mac right now (2) I hate Windows (3) X.org's RandR support is missing hwaccel on a lot of video cards. :-(. If I could cross-grade some of the key software with minimal charge (re-buying it doesn't make much sense to me), and RandR was better, I'd switch to a Linux desktop in a second. Ubuntu 64-bit desktop does in fact boot on the Mac Pro out of the box and it's pretty nice, but without hwaccel RandR, portrait displays don't make much sense on Linux. Fonts under Linux still suck, too, though the situation has improved some. For better or worse, I spend most of the day looking at Courier, anyway.

Even if the programming desktop were a Linux hosted OS, I'd still have a Mac or two on the side for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Pages, and OmniGraffle--the last two are pretty kickass applications. They obviously are limited for sharing source files, but if sharing annotated PDFs is good enough these apps are fantastic.

I would suggest not buying into the computer religion too seriously. These are just tools. I've tried dozens of them. I use what I use for pretty specific reasons--and it's always a compromise.

How many computers total?

There's 2 Mac laptops, a Mac Mini, and a Mac tower in the room. Although the pictures show a lot of PCs in the closet, those have since been moved to the office in California. I still have 1 PC in the closet and a few in the basement. There used to be 12 computers altogether, but it's down to about 7 now.

What are the specs of [other systems]?

Previously, I had about 8 systems with 8 GB of RAM each for testing. Fortunately these have been moved to California.

I still have three 2.66 GHz Xeon systems in the basement with 8 GB of RAM for testing our software, and a 1 GHz Athlon shuttle for dnsmasq, some home-grown network monitor / management tools, and MRTG that monitors the managed switches, etc. I have written some nice tools that plug-in to dnsmasq; I hope to release them "someday.").

The MacBook Pro is a 15" model 2.2 GHz Core2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB internal hard disk that I installed.

The MacBook Air is a 2.1 GHz with 128 GB SSD. I love the weight but hate the 2 GB of RAM.

What flavor of Linux?

When I run Linux on native hardware, I usually install Fedora. VMs run a mix of Fedora, Ubuntu, and Windows. However, most of the PC hardware is running VMware ESX or VMware ESXi.

Can't you just run all of these machines as VMs?

I run a lot of test machines as VMs. I also run several ESX machines as VMs on the Mac Pro.

How much does your electric bill run you each month with all of the computer equipment?

It's not cheap.

For those concerned my carbon footprint is very high, I do compensate a little with a Rinnai tankless water heater. Gas for the water heater is about $6/mo--significantly less gas is required for this than keeping 40 gallons of water hot 24x7. Most of the light bulbs in the house (and the office) are CFLs. Also, because I work at home (and live where there is a good subway system), I hardly ever drive my car. A tank of gasoline lasts me 6-10 weeks. I drive rental cars when I travel more than I drive my car at home.

Do you use Textmate?

I've tried it and love the flexibility of syntax coloring that it offers. However, I'm too entrenched in vim and BBedit to make the switch though. I don't use Emacs, sorry. :-)

What keyboard is that? How much do they cost?

I have two Kinesis Freestyle keyboards (Mac version) that Kinesis customized for me--they put in a 20" cable instead of the 8". I used to have a PC version with the 8" separator and it was too short. The 20" version costs a lot ($40 more), but it's worth it.

The key switches are decent and I find these keyboards extremely comfortable. They were around $180 each w/ shipping.

I bought them directly from Kinesis. I've never seen them in a retail store. Some specialty ergo shops sell them online, but I haven't bought from those stores.

What's in the rack?

In the office closet, there's a Linksys RV082 router, HP ProCurve 1800-24G GigE switch (it's web managed w/ read-only SNMP, sadly no CLI or RS-232), and a patch panel.

In the basement, there's a 1u PDU, a unmanaged 16 port NetGear GigE, and an 8 port KVM.

I didn't see a [wireless access point].

There are 3 AirPort Expresses throughout the house and a decent Linksys N access point.

What's your favorite piece of hardware?

This is tough--I'd say it's tied between my Verizon MiFi and my MacBook Air. I think the MiFi wins out with a slight edge.

What software applications do you use?

This is a bit of a long list. It's probably not much different than what most folks are using; I've tried to provide links for some of the apps that might be lesser-known.

Productivity: PowerPoint, Word, Excel, iWork, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and OmniGraffle.
Communication: Gmail for Business, personal Gmail, Salesforce.com, Skype, iChat, GoToMeeting.
Server: VMware ESX/ESXi, MRTG, Nagios, Fedora, Centos, Ubuntu, snmp, a lot of custom scripts, Terminal, PuTTY, xterm, OpenFiler, iptraf, NFS, Samba, Apache, etc.
Development: gvim, Bugzilla, Trac (for timeline and browsing only--Trac for bug tracking is a total joke), Basecamp, Balsamiq Mockups for UI mock-ups, RoaringDiff, BBedit, Eclipse, Xcode, Flex Builder, sqlite, mysql, VMware Fusion, gcc, make, rpm, bash, python, perl, php, awk, Zterm, minicom, other GNU userland tools.

You might notice I didn't mention many spiffy Windows tools like Notepad++ or TortoiseSVN -- I just don't do that much on Windows beyond testing and VMware administration. If I do have to develop on Windows, Cygwin is a life saver so that I can run bash, xxdiff, etc. Sadly, it seems Cygwin isn't getting much attention these days.

Construction

Why straight drops instead of conduit?

Good question. Probably a combination of things: (1) I didn't have much time for the remodel, so planning was short--I didn't really think of conduit. (2) Keep costs down. Also, I suspect that in-wall conduit would have required thicker walls in some areas, and visible conduit is just ugly.

I don't view this as my ultimate office, just a pretty darn good office. Maybe next time around. :-)

How much did you spend on ripping out the attic? like with plastering and wiring and fans, etc.?

It was fairly cheap. I've learned that contractor rates vary quite a bit from area to area, and it's hard to say exactly what was spent on the office because I did the whole house. But the attic work included new walls, ceiling, insulation, vaulting the ceiling, new fans, new lights, all new wiring, the sub panel, Ethernet drops, put down a new floor in half of the room, sanding the floor, stain, poly, drywall, plaster, paint, trim, the doors. It sounds like a lot--and it was--but I think the contractors gave me pretty good pricing. 2008 was a pretty slow year for them (as of April).

Obviously I am dodging the question, but I will say if you can afford a pretty high end system that you spend a lot of time working at, it's worth checking into the cost of remodeling the room you use it in, if the room is not a suitable environment as is. You might be surprised. After years of "making do" with terrible office situations, this has been a nice change.

There may be possible tax savings for remodeling a home office depending on your circumstances; talk to your accountant. [This is not tax advice.]

Where did you get those fans?

The fans are made by The Modern Fan Company; I bought them from form+function.

Aren't you worried with that many PCs that eventually SOMETHING will burn up while you are away?

No. I assume that this question is really about electrical overload: There's a 60 amp subpanel in the office, and 6 circuits throughout the room. The electrical load is fairly well balanced, and I am slowly upgrading to metered 1U power strips throughout the room. The biggest worry is pushing too many amps through an under-rated cord, and I deal with this by only using 15 amp cords. Recently I've noticed some of these cords rated at 15 amps are quite warm with 8 amp loads, so I'm replacing them with commercial-grade cords.

All that remodeling and you painted the walls white?

The walls are "silver plum"--a light gray. It doesn't photograph so well with my lame photography skills, CFL bulbs, and a cheap camera. Why no accent walls? Mostly because I haven't figured out what I want for colors. I was also worried that the drama of the room might be too much with colors added to it. So for now, off-white it is. The ceiling is just "ceiling white".

Misc

An office for one person? You're not sharing it with anyone?

My girlfriend has her own office elsewhere in the house. Her room is also a dedicated office with a door that closes, perhaps around 13 x 13 ft, wired for Ethernet, colors of her choosing, etc.

No, I will not post photos of her or her office. :-)

No fridge / wet bar / bathroom?

I thought about it, but as a friend of mine said during the remodel, "Don't build a house within a house." It's good to take a break and get out of the room for a few minutes. I have thought about it, though. :-)

Physical security?

There are a number of physical security measures that are implemented, but I'm not going to elaborate.

Do you like writing software? I'm kind of considering something computer-based when I go to college. but not really sure...

Yes, it's about all I've ever wanted to do. It's not for everyone though. A degree in computer science is (or used to be :-) ) a lot of work, especially in math. I struggle with certain aspects of math, but I managed to get through it and had a meaty chapter in my thesis about quaternions. In general I'd suggest double majoring if you can. I often wish I had double majored in CS and Latin.

The day to day aspects of writing software is very different from a CS degree. I enjoy both though. There's a lot more to CS than "computers"; CS isn't really about programming at all. But to be an excellent programmer, you'll need to understand the science of computing, somehow.

I'm trying to decide if I should go to college / start a company / switch jobs / other career advice

I'm flattered you want to ask me about this, but I suspect you'd do better to ask on a web site such as StackOverflow and/or people who know you well.

Also, one minor detail: "awesome office" doesn't necessarily imply "awesome person." It's possible I am clueless, but have a nice office.

I do have a bit of free advice about college though: Go to college! Understand that college is the one time you will be around a lot of single people. Once you're out of college, the number of available people to date goes down. Way down. There's no reason to get a big hurry to start working. Go to college. Chill out. Meet people. Even if you're already the world's greatest hacker who doesn't want to date or meet anyone, realize that college is 4 years you have to hack with almost no interruptions. Live on campus, wear headphones, and hack. Crawl down to the cafeteria, get food, go back to hacking. Or meet girls. Either way, it should be a lot of fun.

You drink too much Coke Zero, which contains Aspartame, which causes cancer!

Yes, I drink too much Coke Zero. There has been controversy over Aspartame for some time. I try to drink a lot of seltzer and regular water, too.

I am a big fan of Diet Coke with Splenda, but I haven't been able to find it in stores for some time.

What lamps are those?

Most of the designer lamps in the office are made by Artemide. I am a huge fan of these lamps. I have two Tolomeo Classics over the 30" monitors, two Tolomeo Minis over the 'L' part of the desk, and a Tolomeo Mega at the end of the room. I also have two of the Artemide Open Table lamps, one in amber and one in indigo. My girlfriend tells me I have a lamp problem. We agree to disagree on this.

Where can I buy X10 gear? x10.com frightens me.

x10.com frightens me as well. I mostly buy from www.thehomeautomationstore.com. I've bought about 20 modules from them and they seem to be a good vendor, but I don't really know anything about them. There is also SmartHome (retail in Irvine, CA) and HomeTech (retail in Cupertino, CA). These two vendors are pricier.

If you want a "reliable" automation system you might consider Insteon over X10. (Update: I've seen a lot of compalints about Insteon hardware being short-lived, do some research before taking my word for it.) I'm cheap and went the X10 route though.

How do you control X10 from the computer?

I am using bottlerocket on Linux with some lame scripts + cron. The hardware bridge is the X10 firecracker module (RS-232-to-RF).

Why did you write a FAQ? Do you have too much free time?

This FAQ was inspired by Stefan Didak's Home Office FAQ. I never understood why he had a FAQ until I decided to share pictures of the office--suddenly, the questions above were coming in rapidly and frequently--and I understood the need to pull together the common questions.

Usually the FAQ is updated during bouts of insomnia.

Why share the office pictures if it takes up so much time?

Short answer: I have met some really cool people as a result of this office page. And no, none of them have crazy offices (or if they do, they didn't mention it).

Long answer: Nothing exists in a vacuum. Back in 2007, blakespot posted this picture of his HP 20" + Apple 30". It was from that picture I got the idea to use 4 of the same HP monitors with an Apple 30". Stefan Didak's notes about his HP ProCurve Ethernet switch resulted in upgrading to the same switch he is using. I didn't know about Ergotron stands until I saw a picture of them in someone's set-up. I never would have thought to install in-wall speaker wiring and wall plates in the living room or the office without the folks posting pictures on avsforum.com. I learned of the Ikea Signum cable trays from this LifeHacker post; otherwise I would have spent 4x as much buying server room cable raceways.

It is my hope that many people will learn something from what I've done to improve their own situation. I'd love to see pictures / write-ups of how you have maximized your productivity / design / space / sanity in your space, whether you have 1 monitor or 30.

Other impressive offices?

• "indygreg"'s incredible office in Indiana. I think this is one of the best and least-known office pages on the web.
• Stefan Didak's office that inspired this web page. Here's a pic of Stefan & me from May 2010.
• Fog Creek -- "But wait, this isn't a home office," you say. That's OK--the goal of this office is to make money, and I assume Joel feels the same way about his.
• Scott Hanselman's home office
• Brian Palmer's office -- I laughed.
• Brian DeHamer's amazing Shed Office in San Diego. In addition to the very cool shed, Brian has found a nice-looking set of office furniture that is very inexpensive.
• Dennis Klein has a nice write-up about his attic office.
• This guy is building a 60 monitor office for trading.
• I'm sure there are others; if you'd like to see your office link here, email me.

Will you design an office for me?

You'd probably do better to hire a professional; I'm just a guy with a few desks, a big room, and a lot of monitors. What works for me may not work for you. Feel free to use any of the ideas presented here.

I am starting a company, any advice?

Read my notes on starting a company.

Who you are?

My name is Mitch. You can follow me on Twitter.

I have a question that wasn't answered...

Feel free to post the question on Flickr or write to me at mitch.haile@gmail.com.

Please try to keep your mail succinct (unlike this page!). I'll try to humor you if you send me your life story, but I may not find your question buried in it. I do try to reply to all questions, up to about a limit of 3 questions / 1 email per person.