Optimal Engineer Screen Layout
Modern tech workers are spoiled with 16 inch MacBook Pro's and large screen monitors. This is how I've arranged my workflow and why, for me at least, it's optimal.
The below is assuming one laptop screen and one monitor.
Required Windows
The following windows, I feel, are necessities that need to be open at all times, and as such, necessitate a permanent space on your desktop:
- Web browser
- At least 1 IDE window
- Communications App (Slack, Teams, Discord)
- Issue Tracker (Asana, Jira)
- Figma (optional)
The following applications I have observed to have open ad-hoc, but don't have a permanent space in my desktop:
- Terminal/Postman
- Internal lnowledge base like Notion/Google Docs
- LLM
In general, though, most of these are either physically small enough that they don't need permanent space, situational, or can be accessed via the browser.
My monitor layout
Placeholder text
