Serious Geek Envy
I’ve never been one for big, flashy office spaces. And despite being a long-term geek, I don’t have an office filled to the brim with tech. I suffice quite nicely with a single monitor, three office machines (laptop, Linux development server, Windows general-use box) and a general home network. I don’t have the time, or the energy, to devote to designing a huge office filled with toys. Plus, I’d have to dust around all that hardware. That’s just not worth the effort.
That said, I must admit to a major case of geek envy when I saw Stefan Didak’s new office. Wow. Just wow. Heck, I’d take his old setup off his hands, just to get all those great monitors. This place looks like something you’d find at NASA or in a relatively recent Star Trek movie. And it’s all functional, which is even better. He actually uses all this equipment. It manages his various websites, provides a development environment for his distributed programming team, and (shocking!) is almost never used for gaming.
As he notes on his site, he uses all the monitors pretty much simultaneously. Unlike some of us, he hates minimizing windows or having one application obstructed by another, so he buys enough screen real estate to make sure that never happens. I can understand how he feels, and have sometimes considered adding a second monitor to my current environment. Screen real estate is a major consideration, especially when you’re writing, testing, and debugging code in certain environments.
This type of setup would also be useful for network monitoring offices (and I’ve seen several that look very similar). Such offices often need to display statistical and availability information for multiple networks, systems, and other resources.
It should be emphasized that all of the systems Mr. Didak has in his office aren’t used as workstations. He has hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, probably set up in a RAID array for safety and redundancy purposes, that are used for large code development offices. Effectively, he has a small server room in his house.
Do you have a room like this, or (scarier still) one that’s even more elaborate? Post a URL of yours in the Comments section, and we can all have a geekfest.