Upgrade to the Walking Desk

So I have been using the walking desk for a few hours every few days.  I noticed that one big issue was that I was looking down at the monitor, even with the riser on the walking treadmill desk.  That was definitely a strain on my neck.  But any higher, and I wouldn't be able to type.

Solution? I need a monitor in front of me.  One I can look at without looking down.  As a touch typist, this isn't a big deal, and would be really handy.

How do you do that, though?  A laptop monitor is connected to the laptop.  Aha, I thought, I'll hang a TV from the ceiling!

So I picked up a new TV for the loft (the current one was a bit too small for the space), and appropriated that 32" set as a new monitor.  Then I picked up a ceiling mount for the TV on Amazon and put it up.

I also moved the treadmill to a different corner of the basement.  Here it is in all its glory:

The invisible man walks again!

My full setup for when I'm working.  Chat window on the left laptop, and active windows on the Yoga and the TV.  Coffee or water on the ledge to the right, remote on the ledge to the left.

Set productivity to 9999!

It works remarkably well.  Time to get back on it!

From an Empty Workspace to a Work of Art

Ok, so I've been working at this awesome new company for a month now.  In that month, I have worked from home a lot of times.  I think I was only downtown for six or seven days in March.

Much has been written about setting up your remote workspace to feel official, and more like you're working, as opposed to sitting on the sofa on your laptop in your PJs.  Remote work requires incredible discipline, and part of that is mentally partitioning your home life from your work life.

But mental partitioning is hard.  It is handy to have some sort of physical partition.  We do have a den with a computer in it, but it's not a dev machine, and that's where Nicole works.  I decided a while ago that I'd make my space in my basement.  But it's an unfinished basement, and there are no physical partitions.

So I decided to physically partition my space.  Not just for separation, but so that when I was on webcam, I wouldn't have an unfinished space as my backdrop.

But I'm not really in position to do a basement remodel at the moment.  So I figured I'd do what they do in the movies and stage shows.  I'd create a set.

I have a couple old stands that I once built for a garage sale.  They were originally meant to last two days and to allow me to hang some rigid 3/4" metal conduit between them to use as a clothes rack.  Instead I've used these two supports over the intervening years for all kinds of things.

For example, I have used them as something for Gamble to paint on.  One day out of the blue, I opened up some cans of old house paint, deck-screwed a plank of plywood onto the uprights and let Gamble go at it. You can clearly see the uprights here.  And this was seven years ago.  And these were repurposed then. Also, this video has one of the best punch lines of any I've ever shot.

I dragged these scraps of wood to our new place.  Since then I've used them as temporary uprights, laid down as a stand for when I'm bottling homebrew (it's perfect for the bottling bucket to sit on), and a number of other things.

As I mentioned earlier, I don't have the ability to do a full room in my basement just yet, but I need something to make it appear I'm in an office, so I repurposed those uprights by hanging a leftover 4x8 sheet of drywall on them.  And then painting it green.

It's leftover green paint from our living room, so it's quite a responsible shade.  I figured it would look very office-y, and it did.  I even hung a plaque and a That Conference camp sign on it.  And then I put casters on it, so that I could roll it in and out of frame as needs dictated.  And it was perfect.

But it was missing... something.   That certain je ne sais quoi that makes it me.  It was boring.

I will be damned if I can find the original art that inspired this project.  I have searched and searched and cannot find it, but if I ever do, I'll link to it here.  I'd seen a beautifully masked wall that was lovingly done up in geometric designs and then painted.  It was a phenomenal piece of wall art, and I figured that if I was going to have a little partial wall, I'd do something like that.

Because when you're presence is mostly online, your backdrop becomes part of your personality.  It's part of the setting.  Ze Frank has his steady backgrounds, and so does John Green, Ray William Johnson, iJustine.  Now, I'm not a vlogger, but if I'm going to spend a decent amount of time online, I'm going to need something immediately identifiable.  It's all about branding.

So I started with the wall, all by itself.  Here's a shot of it by itself from the back.  It's there in place in front of my dev rig.  Yes, I'm using the Peavey amp that I've had for about 25 years as a stand for my third monitor. That's the same amp I rocked out on for Random the other night, so it still sees use.

Here you can see the back of the wall. I've already started masking it.

And here's a closeup of the feet.  They weren't designed to be super stable.  They weren't designed for what I'm trying to do with it.  Yet do it, I have.

The little feet.  They weren't designed for this.  I'm no damned engineer, though I should have consulted with my stepbrothers, who both are.

And here you can see how I got started with the masking.  Gamble helped me at first, because my wingspan just wouldn't support it.  We put the first piece of tape on, then marked some dots an inch from the first piece of tape, put another piece of tape on with those lines, and so on.  The image wasn't really planned, only that I intended for it to evolve organically.

Some of the lines.  The first line placed was the leftmost long "forward slash."

Finished masking and ready for round 2.

So the idea was to paint this, but a single paint color is boring, and two is still kinda boring.  I've always been fascinated by street artists that do spraypaint work.  They get some incredibly realistic and sweet looking paintings from a few minutes of work and a few cans of spray paint.  There's some beautiful randomness here, and some beautiful order.

After all these years, he's still painting on these two uprights.

My vision here was for something nebulous.  Literally like the beautiful pictures you see of faraway space dust. My instructions to Gamble were, "Yeah, put some heavy blue paint there, but make it kinda random, and don't cover the green up completely, so that we get a cloud effect."

So here are all the colors of spray paint that I had and wanted to include.  I can't believe I had so much paint.  I'm sure Home Depot thinks I'm out taggin' and saggin'.

I admit I was skeptical at this point.  I look at the muddle of color there and think, Hooboy, what have I done?  That little random arc of red?  The shades of green and teal in the bottom right?  But I was confident that this was going to work, so I pressed on.  The next step was to add stars.  

Gamble and I had done this before, for a presentation he'd done on Exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system.  We took black poster board, sprayed white spray paint on our hands, and flicked the paint toward the board.  I did this here, too.  I flicked white paint as a star field over every part of the board.

Then I removed the tape.  This reveal was awesome.

This was just amazing when I saw it with the tape off.  

A closeup.  From faraway, you can see the blotchy color from the original, but close up, this really is a thing of beauty.  the strips of tape I took off the wall were as cool as the wall itself.

And of course, one more for the road.  I'm not explaining this shirt, though.  That's a story for another day.

BEAST MODE!

Well, that's how I got my new background.  Nicole insists that I need something more low key for the other side, so I can turn the wall 180 degrees and have a professional setting, so I'll probably do that, too. Anyone have a 4x8 sheet of drywall they can drop off? 

You Should Leave Your Job

Here we are again.  I'm talking to you.  It's just us here, and no one is listening.  Clear your mind.  Take all your preconceived notions about what you were going to do today and toss them out the window.  What I'm going to say may shock you.

You should leave your job.  Soon.  I mean it.  Start looking today.

Look, you know and I know that life is too short to hate your workday.  Let's make a huge assumption: 8 hrs of work a day + 30 minutes lunch + 30 minutes * 2 for commute = 9.5 hrs of your 16 hour day.  That is 60% of your useful day.  If you eat or work longer or are further away from work, the numbers get worse. The numbers get better if you're willing to skimp on sleep for a longer useful day.

You know that every keystroke you give someone is a gift, right?  In this great presentation, Scott Hanselman suggests you check this out.  Are you giving the gift of your limited keystrokes to the right people?  For the right reasons?  Do those keystrokes match up with your values?  Are you giving gifts that others want and only you can provide or are you buying generic gifts that the recipient will ooze with "meh" over.

I've seen your situation before.  You're dark matter.  You're a 5:01 developer.  When you got to the organization you're in, you loved the first project you were put on.  You were hired specifically for that project, so it met your idea of what you'd be doing when you signed on.  You put in lots of time learning, showing people you were excited, showing you could be counted on to deliver.

You were enthusiastic.

But that was years ago.  That was a couple CTOs ago.  That was a couple technology strategy direction changes ago.  The organization has moved on and you've adapted to provide it value, but maybe your day-to-day is not what you wanted to do.  Shoot, it's a convenient commute.  The compensation's right.  Family health matters made it inconvenient to take on a change at that time.

You like what you did at the organization in the past, but now there's very little to do.  You're in maintenance mode for the product you were hired to build.  Management appetite for new development is nil because of cost cutting.  You've been told to keep the lights on.  Leadership doesn't want to spend time adding new features because they would rather buy a replacement system, but never seem to actually complete the research to buy that replacement, resulting in continued use of subpar tools, and missing opportunities to sharpen developer chops.

You're a developer, but because of "budgetary constraints", the organization is not allowed to staff a team that develops software appropriately.  So you are doing business analysis or QA, because there's no one in those roles.  In agile teams that's something that's expected of everyone, but your projects aren't agile.  You spend a lot of time writing up documentation that never gets used or read.

The excellent team you signed on with?  Excellent teams are an unstable equilibrium.  If you were on a tiger team of development that does everything right, did your organization split it up to "seed" the talent in multiple places, not realizing that it's the team that did things right, not the individuals?  Great people working on excellent teams get recruited to join other excellent teams.  So maybe your team fell victim to entropy.

So that team is no longer.  Maybe that was many reorganizations ago, before many different sets of leadership came in and tried to optimize output of a fixed group of resources.

Maybe your organization favors butt-in-seat over other productivity metrics.  For that reason, you can't work from home, contributing to that feeling of wasted commute time.  Collaborative technology is discussed, and maybe even experimented with, but because not enough people are using it, it's never optimized.  Time-shifting is not allowed to enable you to work at your most productive times.

Maybe you're on a support rotation.  That wasn't in the original sign-on agreement, but "You know... We all have to be team players", and you don't really mind since it's not all that often.  Although when it does, even though comp time should be an expectation, it's never discussed.

Yeah, maybe this describes your situation.  Maybe only some of it does.  If it does, however, you should leave your job.

But maybe you're not convinced to move.  You're too complacent.  You're comfy.  This job thing is a solved problem and you don't think you'll ever really need to look for another one.  You can coast out your career on your current skill set.

Maybe, but I've put together a few signs that it might be time to consider moving on.

Signs

• Don't like working on what you're working on
• Don't like who you're working with 
• Don't like your immediate manager
• Don't feel as if the discourse is civil or nonconfrontational 
• Don't believe in management's vision or goals
• Don't believe in your management's ability to make good decisions
• Don't feel valued for your contributions 
• Don't feel the tasks in front of you are very exciting
• Don't feel focused enough on any one thing
• Don't have clear reporting structures; have overmatrixed teams
• Don't feel like your organization can prioritize
• Don't feel like productivity is as important as appearance
• Don't feel like the organization is moving forward quickly
• Don't feel like the organization makes data-based decisions 

I read the following as symptoms of organizational dysfunction.  To change any one of these is like moving a cultural mountain and require clarity of vision and charismatic leadership from the very top.  I don't think that mid-level management in any organization can change these effectively.  If you recognize a lot of these, it may not be just your position in jeopardy; the whole company may be in trouble long-term.

Symptoms

• Very peaked/deep org structures indicate a problem with reporting.  Need a low ratio of managers/doers.
• Lack of information flow
• Lack of recognition
• Lack of celebration for hires or promotions
• Lack of visible employee enthusiasm
• Lack of unity of processes across divisions
• Too many junk drawers 
• Too much reliance on transition plans (which don't work) 
• Lots of Not Invented Here silos of experience 
• Headcount is kept flat regardless of technical investment or debt reduction 

So if any of this resonates with you, consider leaving your current gig.  Fast.  There is too much demand in the development industry to spend time in an organization where you're not happy.  Some organizations just don't get it, but there are plenty that do.  Find one and let the ones that do hire unenthusiastic, unmotivated shlubs to barely work until they go out of business or get sold to a competitor.

If all of this resonates with you, call a recruiter today.  Shoot, call me.  I know enough recruiters and folks at good places to be a good resource, and I'm happy to help you find your passion.  If you just want to talk, I'm here too. You'd do well to find yourself a mentor, too.

And if you're happy with your gig, good on you.  Come on out and be part of the community.

I just want you to be happy.  Yes you.

Walking Desk

I'm always looking for new ways to work.  I have never hidden my opinion that the cube farm is the worst of all possible worlds, lacking the productivity of the war room/pit, and lacking the privacy and clarity of mind of the office.  And cube farms almost never offer the whiteboard capability of either of those.

But my criticisms do not end with the workspace.  It's widely noted that a sedentary lifestyle, lived by most tech and knowledge workers, is devastating to health in the workplace.  (Check out Get Up and Code for some more motivation than I can muster.) So many developers and other cube-dwellers do nothing but sit for 8 hours a day, using barely-if-at-all ergonomic equipment, most of the time with crappy posture.

So anything that gets a knowledge worker up and out of their seat is a good thing in my book.  I love the idea of walking meetings, and I've often had many productive business conversations while walking on the office walking trail.  Companies that have walking trails should promote their positive use more and encourage people to do their business in a very healthy way.

So it should come as no surprise that I have been following the trend in the tech culture of hacking your workspace to include those sit-balls, standing desks, and even treadmill desks.  Stand while typing? Walk while typing? Walk while coding?  Is this uber-productive and healthy, or multi-tasking gone mad?

Hanselman suggests in one of my favorite presentations of all time that one way to make more hours in the day is to do things while exercising.  Netflix + treadmill FTW, for example.  So it sure makes sense that those of us that work at computers all day should be able to make some use of a standing or treadmill desk.

Walking and standing desks are not really even that novel by now.  This experiment has been tried and written about.  Over and over and over again, to be sure.  I wouldn't call the concept mainstream, by any means, but it's not really new.

For example, I talked to someone at the office that wanted to try a standing desk as maybe being a little easier on the back.  I think that's a reasonable request to make, but the individual I spoke to offered that they didn't want to stick out and be the lone person with one-off or weird equipment.  It's a little sad to me that someone I know is afraid to ask for something that will physically help them because the culture doesn't encourage them to find the best way to work for them.

So score another one for remote work.  In your home office, you have the freedom to set it up the way you want.  I recently talked to a company whose entire tech staff all had some form of walking desk, and they all worked from a home office.  They suggested that I at least give it a try.

Sounds good.  I like to try things.

I have a treadmill that has pretty solid arms on it for support, so I thought I could probably fashion a temporary desk to try it out.  I happened to have an 8 ft scrap plank that was just the width of these arms, and some old scrap 2x4 for stabilization.  Here's what I came up with...

The Buildout

It starts with the bare treadmill.  You can see the arms that I'm going to place the plank on.

The invisible man went for a walk.  Naked.  In my shoes!

Nothing more than a strip of plywood cut to length with a couple 2x4s deck-screwed onto it.  The 2x4s sit just outside the rails so that the whole thing won't move left to right.

A very simple construction.

I placed the support over the beams.  It fit perfectly.  Here it is with the laptop sitting on it.  Trouble is, those bars are around waist level.  That means that my arms would be almost fully extended to type.  It was not comfortable to either look at the laptop or type.

The Invisible Man is now hanging out at the treadmill desk.  Still naked, that perv!

So we dreamed up a little top extension.  A platform on the platform, as it were.  This was made from the rest of the sheet of plywood from the platform itself and a couple scraps of 3/4" particle board we had remaining from one of our prior years' Halloween projects.

Here, Gamble helps me put together a top extension to the platform.

And once we put it in place, we saw a couple things.  One, the height was perfect.  Two, the support sides for the top extension hit the front handrest/heart rate sensors (I never use these, so I don't mind covering them).  I was going to have to notch those out.

Much better, but not perfect.

I build a lot of stupid little things around my house out of plywood and 2x4, when a rough construction will fit the bill, but I really don't like the look of unfinished wood.  I also don't have a lot of patience for stain, and don't like the cleanup of painting, but spray paint, spray paint I can do.  I took out a can of leftover black, and Gamble and I painted the pieces.

Taggin'.

Then we waited for the paint to dry.  It took forever, like watching paint dry.  Then we screwed the top to the bottom, and put it up on the treadmill:

Here you can see the finished piece.  It's at the perfect height, and you can see the angle I cut the back of the top extension to fit.  Note also, the Invisible Man has finished his workout.

Here's the final product.  When not using a laptop, you can still see the stats fine, and it's only a bit of a reach to hit the numbers.  With a laptop, however, you can see precisely nothing.  That's kinda good, because as anyone who uses a treadmill can tell you, sometimes it's more motivating if you forget how far you've gone (see throw yourself at the treadmill and miss).

Sweet.  The finished product.  The paint is dry to the touch, but looks wet around the edges still.  

The Verdict

I can't give you a full verdict just yet, since I only used it for a couple days before heading to Codemash. Once I had this built, I got on the treadmill.  What I can say is that starting out, it's hard to get used to.  The first thing I tried to do was read articles on my feedreader, and I found that the side to side motion of my head and body made it a little tough to concentrate on the screen.

I also didn't really know what speed to start at.  Some people that use a walking desk recommend 2 mph, so that's where I started.  I usually warm up at a walking pace of 3 mph and go from there, but given that this is meant for long periods of time, I figure I'll go slow.  My treadmill doesn't really like speeds slower than 2 mph, so this seemed like a good place to start.

After 20 minutes, though, I found that sensation had gone away enough to try typing.  I opened up Webmatrix and pulled open the source to www.kevinpdavis.com, I pulled down a NuGet package and included it in a sample page, just to get the feel of coding.  It's a little distracting, and I didn't feel that I was super quick.  It felt like each thing I did took extra time, but maybe that was just self conscious.

After I got down, I felt a little sore in my back and hips.  It's been a while since I've been on regular exercise, so this isn't a huge surprise, but definitely unwelcome (that said, this is why I'm looking at using a treadmill desk, after all).

So this morning, I tried again.  I've written this entire article while standing, and it's been relatively comfortable the whole time.  I got right up to speed and started typing right away, and haven't really felt weird about it (well, maybe a couple times, but only for a minute or so).  It's been roughly an hour, however, and I'm starting to get tight in the hips and back, so it's probably time to stop for now, right at the hour mark.

Another Attempt
For us coders, a big question is whether it's possible to get into the zone while walking.  Can you concentrate on a difficult problem, using whatever tools you like, while walking.  I very much wanted to figure it out, so I made another attempt, this time with some work I needed to get done.

And it turns out yes, it's totally possible to code.  You eventually just kinda forget you're walking.  Until you get tired, or you get a little thirsty (the shelf is big and sturdy enough, however, to handle a beverage on it, but remembering to keep hydrated isn't obvious).

One thing I did notice is that after I got off, I had sea legs, where it was almost weird to not be walking.  I'd heard similar things from people who use walking desks, so it didn't surprise me that much.

If you have any feedback, recommendations, or experiences, I'd love to hear about them in the comments or on twitter @kevinpdavis.