Working from home is hard. Harder than anyone who has never really done it realises. There are distractions, lots of them, and a distinct lack of separation between work and home, so it pays to have a good work environment.

So, what is a good work environment? Some combination of big monitor, powerful machine and guitars.

Having recently spec’d out a new machine, it is time to share.

Main development machine:

  • Samsung 305T-plus LCD, 30 inches or 76 cm of development real-estate.
  • Intel Core i7 920 Processor
  • 8GB Memory – 4 × 2GB Corsair Twin-X DDR3 (Not ECC, much to the chagrin of one of my fellow devs)
  • Asus P6T Deluxe EXGTE Motherboard
  • 2 x Seagate SATA 1.5TB HDD
  • FreeBSD 7.1 (amd64) running mirrored ZFS on the 1.5TB drives.

Just enough power to keep me going. I still need to run some benchmarks to see how much awesome the box can throw out (although I know the FreeBSD ZFS implementation is still a bit slower than UFS in certain situations due to caching limitations).

The second machine is an old AMD Athlon that I have running as a router at the moment.

Then for those moments of deep though, an adequate dose of guitars and amplifiers to be applied as required.