Last year was quite the year for me personally, professionally, and creatively. There was just a lot of change. One them that stuck throughout was just “re-thinking how I do things”. I was pretty comfy in my tools, gear, and workflows and had become curious about other methods. It quickly turned into a rabbit hole 😆.
Workflows
I spent several months last year kind of re-thinking workflows. This ranged from how I work and the tools I use to get that work done to the architecture of code I write to improve iteration time.
Hardware
I went through a series of keyboards out of curiosity. In fact, at one point I went to a colemakmod-dh layout. I got relatively comfy with it, but ultimately went back to QWERTY. The next thing I sprung for was ortho-linear. Again I bounced back and forth, and ultimately landed on using that fulltime. My current keyboard is the glove80, and I’m loving it!
Software
I never really cared that much about my editor until this year. I was a daily vscode user for 6+ years. This year I went and learned vim-bindings and never went back. My daily env was vscode + visual studio (for C++). Then I went to Rider for C++. Then I kind of became obsessed with wanting to unify my editor to be “one thing”. In the end I don’t think that was possible with Unreal C++. IDE assistance is just too good for that flavor of C++. But fast forward a few months later and I landed on a different tech stack. The rundown of IDEs I tried last year:
After a huge amount of back and forth between vscode/neovim I ultimately settled in neovim.
Skillset
I focused on having a more efficient keyboard layout that works with my day-to-day workflows. It was quite the journey. One of those core aspects was just learning to type “more properly”. Since focusing on improving typing again with a split keyboard and vim bindings I’ve been finding myself enjoying typing again. Even for a while I was looking for excuses to do so. Some days I actually have a stronger desire to type then to actually program!
Onward
Here’s to hoping all those things pay off in 2024. I certainly feel better about my setup now, but I’ll have to look back on 2024 to see if any of this sticks.