I can't has cheezburger

Before my fiancé and I bought a house in Portland, I found myself feeling particularly stir-crazy in my apartment. I was sitting at my desk in my cramped bedroom, right next to the bathroom door, and I realized I just couldn’t concentrate. I started hunting around on Craigslist and I found myself a private office for rent several blocks away. It was dingy, tiny, and certainly expensive for what it was, but it had fiber internet and it was mine.

I loved it.

I’m a deeply introverted person and I quickly fell in love with having a place where I could find solitude. I had a conference talk coming up pretty soon and I remember going into the office one weekend afternoon and finding that hours passed by in seemingly the blink of an eye as I was just focused on working in silence.

Also, once I got my stuff inside there, it felt a little less dingy. I swear there were moments when it was tidy.

Having a properly walled off room with a door that I can close off to the world makes a huge difference, and when I started doing my after-hours side projects in this office I knew that at some point I wanted to find a job where I could work remotely so that I could enjoy the solitude like this by default.

Now that we’ve got a house, my office got quite a nice little upgrade.

A step up both in square footage and aesthetic appeal, it’s a fun and quirky space that is my own. The space is kind of old, and I am hoping to do a remodel in the next few years (repainting walls, replacing the built-in shelves with Dieter Rams-style modular shelving, and replacing the nearly 100 year old hardwood floor that’s given me splinters a few times). But it is my happy place, and i love continuously making small tweaks to it to make it just perfect for me. It’s always a mess (seriously, the picture you’re seeing is after I extensively tidied it) but that’s okay, because it’s mine and a door separates the chaos in here from the rest of the house.

But of course, the piéce de résistance is the hammock chair.

I absolutely love this thing. I bought this from La Siesta. It’s oversized, which makes it appropriately sized for me, to the point that I can stretch my legs out fully and still be comfortably cocooned in the chair.

In the afternoons sometimes I like to grab my laptop and lap desk, and just snuggle up in the hammock chair, and let time just slip away around me as I fully concentrate on whatever it is I’m doing. The sides of the hammock serve as blinders in a sense, helping me to feel completely enclosed in this little tiny, comfortable space.

And we moved into this house with great timing. Just after we settled in, the pandemic happened, and having a home with ample space for us to each have solitude proved to be essential to our mental health.

To be clear, I do miss freedom of movement, and knowing that the office is the only place I’m allowed to work while we wait out the pandemic is frustrating. I look forward to traveling to San Francisco next year to visit HQ and it will be fun to see my coworkers in the flesh again, but you won’t see me ever running with enthusiasm to work in another open-plan office for as long as I can help it. It is still a small joy every morning to walk downstairs, open the vibrant blue door (Sherwin Williams Hyper Blue C–167 if you’re wondering), and step into this room that is just for me to be me and think and enjoy solitude.

Remember how I said I was going to post more in 2021, and how I haven’t posted anything since January? Well, that’s about to change!

I’m always on the lookout for the very best equipment for my work and leisure. Having great tools that you love makes you more productive (and even if it doesn’t, at least it makes you happy), and I think that the best craftspeople have a strong affinity for the tools they use. I’d like to share with you my current setup as an exercise in sharing some of my own values.

My goal here isn’t to be exhaustive and list every tool I use; most are super popular and not that exciting to recommend (Chrome, for instance, doesn’t need a post here, nor does iMessages).

I’m not making recommendations; I’m just sharing my setup. I like to think I have great taste, but keep in mind that I’m a nerdy dude who likes to throw money at problems. I aim to share the decision process I’ve taken to choosing these tools. Maybe you’ll see some things in here that might make your life easier.

I’m also not making glowing product reviews here. I’m sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly. But at the end of the day, these products remain the ones I stick with, day in and day out. Things aren’t perfect, but they are solid. Reading through my criticisms, you’ll gain a better understanding of my values of what makes a great product, and ideally it’ll help you decide what you care about in a product too.

Oh, also: I’m not providing affiliate links or anything here. That’s not what this is about. This is very much an exploration of the different choices I’ve made over the years to build up a rock solid toolbox. I don’t want you to necessarily buy anything I post about here, and I stand to gain nothing from you buying these things. These are just the items I like to surround myself with every day.