The perfect workstation for Extreme Programming

My team is moving to new offices in Redwood City, and we've resolved to lay out our workspace in an XP-friendly bullpen style that favors pair programming and impromptu meetings.

While visualizing our new digs, I had an idea. What if, instead of making it easy to gather around a single computer, the computer itself were mobile? Laptops aren't the answer; I can't write code of any depth without an ergonomic keyboard and a mouse, and I am addicted to giant LCDs. So I'm looking for a tiny rolling workstation stand with a VESA monitor arm, an adjustable keyboard/mouse tray, and a UPS so I can move around without shutting down the PC. A quick search on the web produced many contenders that I had to rule out for various reasons: too ugly (wood laminate), too fragile-looking, keyboard tray not sufficiently adjustable to the 26-inch height I prefer, not really compatible with a VESA mount, or priced for verticals rather than the consumer market.

This is the closest to what I have in mind.

Rolling PC Workstation

But I wanted more of a flexible monitor arm so that we could easily move the monitor around according to whoever's coding at the moment, and I'd imagined the keyboard tray jutting forward a little more, both to counterbalance the monitor arm (visually if not physically) and to enable me to stretch my legs out a bit underneath without straddling the PC. And if I ditch the included tray and monitor mount and replace them with my own, then I'm paying $250 for a rolling pole, which doesn't feel like such a great deal.

Any ideas? By the way, I decided to disable blog comments after a barrage of unsuccessful spam attacks, so if you have an idea, post it somewhere on the web, and my Google Web Alerts will eventually pick it up.

Categories

,

Leave a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Mike Tsao published on June 10, 2008 6:50 PM.

Fixing Cygwin XWin/xterm launch problems was the previous entry in this blog.

Tonight's Hell's Kitchen is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.2-en