Workspace Tuning: Beyond the Kitchen Table

Remote work has pushed many of us into improvised setups, with laptops balanced on cookbooks and posture that would make an ergonomist wince. In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, host Drew McLellan sits down with Ben Frain to talk about the practical side of upgrading a home workspace — moving from temporary solutions to a space that supports both comfort and concentration.

Frain, who describes himself as something of a workspace enthusiast, shares his perspective on what actually makes a difference when you're setting up a home office. The conversation is less about expensive gear shopping lists and more about approaching your environment with intention.

Starting With the Basics

The episode zeroes in on the reality that most people aren't starting from a dedicated office. Whether you're still at the kitchen table or have graduated to a spare room, Frain emphasizes that small changes can lead to significant improvements. The discussion covers frequently overlooked elements like lighting, cable management, and the physical layout of your daily tools.

A recurring theme is the idea of optimizing for the work you actually do — both mechanically and procedurally. Rather than defaulting to a generic desk setup, he encourages tailoring the workspace to your own workflow and physical needs.

Anchoring Your Setup

For those ready to invest a little more, Frain discusses the importance of foundational pieces rather than peripheral gadgets. This includes choosing the right monitor position, ensuring proper keyboard placement, and being deliberate about your daily setup ritual.

While the conversation focuses on the physical workspace, it extends to peripherals that can shape your experience. If you're curious about one of the most tangible upgrades — a mechanical keyboard — Frain has published a detailed guide on the subject, covering the options available to beginners and enthusiasts alike.

Further Reading From the Episode

Here are some of the relevant links and recent articles mentioned in the show:

Recent Smashing Content

The team at Smashing has also been busy publishing new technical tutorials, ranging from modern React tooling to typography and accessibility.

Workspace Investments That Pay Off

When the pandemic forced millions of developers into makeshift home offices, many suddenly faced a common question: what do I actually need to buy to work comfortably for eight-plus hours a day? Ben Frain, a UI/UX design technical lead at Bet365 and author of Responsive Web Design With HTML5 and CSS, has strong opinions on where your money goes furthest — and where it gets wasted.

Frain's first rule is simple: spend on the chair before the desk. The old adage holds up, he says, because the chair is the single most important factor in comfort over a full workday. He admits to once buying a £45 office chair from Amazon that lacked forward tilt. After 45 minutes it was digging into the underside of his thighs, and his legs were going numb. It wasn't until he examined the office chairs provided by his employer that he realized what he was missing — quality chairs from companies like Herman Miller cost real money because serious engineering goes into them.

Refurbished Herman Miller Aerons can be found for around $300, which Frain suggests is a reasonable expense when you consider the alternative: medical bills and physiotherapy for back problems later. A decent chair with forward-tilt capability can resolve posture issues immediately. Drew McLellan, host of the Smashing Podcast, backs this up from personal experience — a tilting chair fixed his recurring lower back complaints in his twenties almost instantly.

So what about the desk itself? Frain points out that inexpensive options exist even now, including basic slabs of wood from IKEA. But he's a convert to electronically adjustable standing desks. He initially hesitated at the price, seeing it as an indulgence, but now considers it worth every penny. The key benefit is frictionless movement between sitting and standing throughout the day — manual crank handles, he admits, simply don't get used because they're too much effort.

Mouse and keyboard are areas where developers tend to be inexplicably cheap, Frain observes. Tradespeople will happily spend thousands on tools, yet developers balk at $100 for a mouse or $200 for a keyboard and default to whatever ships with their computer. If you're developing RSI symptoms or general discomfort, the input devices deserve attention. Vertical mice are popular among Frain's colleagues for preventing strain, and they cost more than standard mice — but that's money spent on avoiding a real problem.

Setting Up for Video Calls and Screen Comfort

Remote work has made video calls a daily reality, and Frain has some practical advice for looking decent on camera. The first is unconscious: raising a standing desk too high during a call makes you loom over the other participants, which reads as aggressive. The second is camera position — you want to look directly into the webcam, not at an awkward angle. Lighting matters too, though Frain jokes that he's saying this while sitting half in shadow himself.

McLellan has gone further with a solution borrowed from streaming: an Elgato Key Light, a large LED panel on a stand that clamps to the desk and sits above the monitor. The color temperature and brightness are adjustable from desktop software. The difference is dramatic, he says. Webcams often expose for bright windows behind you, leaving your face dark and making focus difficult. When you're properly lit as the subject, the camera can focus better and your facial expressions read clearly on the call.

Screen glare is another issue that catches people off guard when they move to a room with different lighting than an office. McLellan finds that morning light from windows washes out the left side of his monitor, so he subconsciously shifts his work to the right side of the screen. The obvious solution — switching from a dark code editor theme to light text on dark during the day — might be less cool, he says, but it's easier on the eyes.

The Mechanical Keyboard Renaissance

Frain is something of a mechanical keyboard evangelist, having written a complete guide on the topic for Smashing Magazine. He's quick to clarify that these keyboards won't make you a better developer — but they can make you feel more productive, which has its own value.

The first surprise for most people is the range of layouts. Beyond the full-size keyboards with dedicated number pads, there are compact options: 65% boards that keep arrow keys but drop function keys, down to tiny 40% layouts. Frain's own journey involved realizing that the big keyboard he used, with a dedicated numpad, was pure indulgence — he analyzed his actual usage and found he never needed those keys.

Hesitant beginners should start by considering switch type, not aesthetics. The colors used by Cherry MX, the original switch manufacturer, have become a de facto standard adopted by compatible makers like Kailh:

  • Blue — clicky switches with an audible click and tactile bump. Great for rhythm, terrible for open offices (if your coworkers dislike the sound of a machine gun).
  • Brown — tactile switches with the same resistance at the top of the keypress but no click. A safe default; McLellan and Frain both started here.
  • Red — linear switches that travel straight up and down with no tactile event. Favor speed.
  • Silent variants — available for nearly all switch types, for people who share space.

Beyond switches, keyboards vary in keycap material, legends (some enthusiasts even remove labels entirely), and layout. Touch typists will recognize the homing bumps on the F and J keys — Frain assumed those were manufacturing artifacts for years before learning their purpose.

Software compatibility, once a headache for Mac users, is largely solved. Dip switches on the board or built-in key combinations let you remap the position of the super/Windows/Command key. Tools like Karabiner, a freeware utility, handle deeper remapping. There's even freeware that logs every keypress and generates a heat map of which keys you actually hit, replacing assumptions with data about your real usage patterns.

One practical feature of modern mechanical keyboards is hot-swap sockets — if you discover you hate your switches, you can pull them out and swap in different ones without soldering. That's much cheaper than buying a whole new board. Resale values are also strong, so the risk of experimentation is lower than it seems.

The truly ambitious can build a keyboard from scratch, soldering switches onto a bare PCB. Frain recently completed his first build after years of using pre-assembled boards. But he strongly advises against this as a first step. Keyboards are getting easier to find thanks to gaming culture, with major peripheral makers like Logitech and Corsair now offering mechanical options. Those gaming-focused models also drive down prices through mass production.

His advice for someone starting out: don't overthink it. Pick one that looks like something you'd enjoy using, figure out whether you want it clicky or quiet (the one thing you can't easily change), and accept that you may go through two or three boards before finding your match. The deeper risk, he warns, is spending days configuring rather than working — a syndrome familiar to anyone who's customized a code editor into oblivion.

Health, Ergonomics, and a Cautionary Tale

Even the best equipment can't compensate for spending all day in one position. One unsung factor in workplace health is physical fitness and core strength. McLellan notes that since improving his overall activity level and fitness, he can sit in poor chairs for stretches without suffering — his body has more resilience to fall back on.

For anyone with existing discomfort, ergonomic keyboards may help. The big name in mechanical ergonomics is the Ergodox EZ, which splits the keyboard into two panels and allows adjusting the angle of each. They're expensive but worth considering if you're dealing with RSI, Frain says.

Frain's own recent experience is a stark reminder of how quickly everything can change. In early February, on a snowy day in the UK, he took a shortcut through a field to get back to the office in time for a meeting. He climbed a roughly six-foot fence he'd crossed many times before. On the other side, he caught his wedding ring on where the fence wires terminated. The resulting injury — a ring avulsion — tore the ligaments from his palm and cost him most of one finger. He learned at the hospital that such accidents happen at least once a weekend.

The recovery was surprisingly manageable for typing. His brain remapped the missing finger within three or four weeks, enough that he could use the time away from work to finish writing his book. He'd lost one of the weakest fingers on his non-dominant hand, which softened the impact — in contrast, he was told, your little finger accounts for 40 percent of lifting grip strength.

The lesson McLellan draws from this is about accessibility. Most people never think they'll need it until something changes — a broken arm, failing eyesight, or, yes, losing a finger. The sudden reliance on adaptive techniques is a humbling reminder that accessibility isn't something for "other people," it's something everyone eventually needs.

For those currently setting up home offices and making purchasing decisions, Frain offers two final takeaways. First: a mechanical keyboard won't magically make you a better developer, but removing physical friction from typing genuinely helps maintain focus. Second, and perhaps more immediately practical for anyone who wears one: maybe reconsider that wedding ring while climbing fences. The keyboard, after all, only works if you have the fingers to type with.

This article is based on a conversation from the Smashing Podcast. The full soundtrack of the episode is available for listening.