Travelling with 24” Monitors

OS X has some behavior that honestly gets into my way when I’m swapping back and forth between editing and doing command line work, but has a benefit when doing front-end work.

Put the browser on screen two. Put your IDE and Dev tools on the main monitor. You aren’t really going to operate your IDE and the dev tools at exactly the same time. So you can write your code, flip to the browser, test and inspect your changes, and flip back when it doesn’t work.

I have two monitors and my laptop screen, which is really 2.5 monitors. Since I upgraded one of the screens to a 27 inch, the real estate difference between that monitor and my laptop is so stark that I resist using the laptop screen at all. I really only use all three in a handful of situations.

Screen juggling gets non-trivial when the work I’m doing involves command line tools with behavior showing up in a UI - either our UI, or our infrastructure (eg, modifying a build script that is breaking only in CI).

Occasionally I have to keep a semi-active eye on our production stats while also progressing on other work. But only about 10% of the people in our program have to do that work, and we tend to tag team. I could almost do that work by bringing a tablet into the mix.

But even still, the third screen would barely be necessary if I wasn’t taking little breaks all the time to do other work, like research, or to blow off steam on HN. My windows begin to get mixed up and hunting the right one down gets more complicated.

Not to be that guy, but be careful you don’t burn anything down with that electrical work.

I'm working remotely for a month right now and needed a monitor there to work. I had two ideas:

1. bring one in a suitcase on my flight

2. just buy one locally once I got there

I decided to just bring my existing 27" monitor and wait until the day of my flight to try and pack it... Of course it was about 2 inches too long for a standard large suitcase.

I quickly found a (physical) store which sold a cheap 23" Dell monitor and bought it. It easily fit into the suitcase and I've been happily using it for 3 weeks now. Only downside was going back to 1080p :(

Depending on the server build and your physical strength you'll have a lot of trouble lifting it there. My 3U/12x3.5" lives on a cupboard (few inches lower than overhead bins), and I would never dare to (re-)move it (from) there with the disks inserted. Without them it's still heavy enough and a pain to move around, but then I'm more on the nerdy end of the STR scale ;-)

How far do you sit from the TV? How near or far is comfortable compared to a monitor that fits on your desk. I'm contemplating a similar setup.