Everything in this room has a job. Some of it does obvious work: the monitors, the chair, the microphones. But a lot of it is there because it starts a specific conversation. If you ask about the Barbie on the shelf, I get to talk about Depop. If you spot the textbooks, you already know something about how I think before I’ve said a word. The wall art, the trinkets, the colour of the light. None of it is accidental and all of it has been tested, quietly, over years.
Three years ago I wrote Contracting is all in the preparation, a checklist for tech contractors and small agencies on what to buy and why. It is still one of the most-read pieces on this site, and a 2026 refresh of it is on the way. What it has never shown you is the room where all of that actually happens.
This is that room.
Click a number on the photo to jump to its entry below, or click a list entry to flash its hotspot. There are twenty-one numbered things; a few dozen more get a mention afterwards.
- Music corner
- Ibanez Upswing EUB My main instrument. Out of frame to the left there's a rack of ten more guitars. The studio gear used to live in a different room and it was less convenient; there's so much overlap with the kit I need for work and video that the two corners now share the floor.
- Backup Windows laptop on stand It lives here specifically because this is where I sit for video calls; the window light is good and from this seat the desk becomes the camera background (more on that further down). Cross-platform testing is the day-job reason. It's also a nice machine to type on, and it comes to site with me sometimes depending on the gig.
- Beyerdynamic DT770 headphones Studio cans for monitoring and critical listening. They're nice for calls too.
- Novation synth & effects Lives on a keyboard stand with a tangle of patch cables and a small rack of effects, including a Neon Egg Planetarium. Behind it: a Genz Benz amp, an Epiphone, and a Matamp.
- Recording accessories Pop filters, patch cables, and the rest live in a basket left of the desk so they're not always cluttering the recording area.
- Audio-Technica mic pair An AT4040 for proper recording (clear, honest, almost too detailed) and an AT2035 as the warmer, more flattering everyday option. Both housed in a small vocal booth, both running through a Focusrite Scarlett. For idea capture I use a Sennheiser lavalier, often clipped on while I'm driving so I can dictate notes without having to pull over.
- Main desk
- Pendant light Yellow shade, deliberately matched to the blind, the wall art and my tinted glasses. Lighting in here belongs to a system; more on that below the list.
- Architectural study painting My own work. The roof beams of an old barn. If you're going to spend most of your waking life in one room you should put something on the wall you actually want to look at.
- Main monitor The desk's primary display: an MSI 32-inch curved 4K. Currently showing the Deltastring brand. If you don't love your own brand, how can you expect your clients to?
- Corsair mechanical keyboard A K70 with the disco lights set to "off". I tolerate the lights because the typing feel is right.
- JLab vertical mouse I need a vertical mouse because of old injuries; flat ones aren't an option for me. This one recently replaced my old Anker vertical, which had served me well for years.
- HÅG Capisco chair The saddle-shaped one. I move a lot during a working day and the Capisco is built for that. The height range matters too. It also works in the reverse position, like a watchmaker's stool, which is the right posture for my hobby electronics. Tried one when I worked at Hofy (now part of Deel), who kit out remote workers with proper gear. Took me a while to get my own.
- Red box of SD cards, SSDs and adapters All the small storage and connector bits in one place. If it's red, it's the box.
- Secondary monitor An AOC 1440p, around £100. On a clamp stand so I can rotate it portrait when I'm working from a long document, or leave it landscape with calendar, Slack and Beacon on it during calls.
- Right wall & shelves
- Fujifilm camera Top right of the desk shelf. Orange, which means it's Deltastring kit. It shoots YouTube content, product demos, and tutorial videos for the support agents at the clients we work with.
- Top of the desk unit shelf An IKEA Bluetooth speaker (almost always playing LBC; James O'Brien has the feel of a guy at the next desk, and after a first career running pubs I'm used to the sound of middle-aged blokes ranting). Various other cameras, a Rode mic, and a row of hard disk drives I use for cold backups.
- Old PC parts, painted yellow Wall art made out of dead components. They tell the story of someone who has been building and learning in both software and hardware for a long time.
- Yellow wheelie storage unit Camera mounts, lens wipes, video accessories, action cams. Anything I need quickly when I'm setting up to shoot something.
- MacBook Pro M2 (Touch Bar) The orange-coded Deltastring travel and video-call laptop. Comes around the house with me when I'm doing something hands-on, like dictating notes from the garage while I'm working on the project BMW E30.
- Anker Solix C1000 UPS for the desk and a portable solar generator for working from anywhere with no mains. Bought after a stretch at the previous place with regular power cuts and network outages: I can run the Starlink from it and keep working through both. There's a second one in the car so I never arrive at a site uncharged. The 2023 piece sold uptime hard; this is what uptime looks like at home.
Everything in here is engineering
The room is built to do work for me while I’m not actively working. Light, ergonomics, conversation, brand: all of it engineered into the environment so I don’t have to think about any of it during the part of the day when I’m being paid to think about other things.
Three threads run through the design.
One: yellow is mine, orange is Deltastring’s
The 2023 prep piece told you to pick a colour and mark your gear with it so you don’t accidentally walk out of someone else’s office holding their charger. I picked yellow. That wasn’t a new decision — yellow had been my personal colour for years before Deltastring existed. Over time the rule grew up into a system.
The painting, the wall art, the wheelie unit, the pendant shade, the roller blind, my Vallon moto aviator sunglasses: all yellow. Some of that is aesthetic. Some of it is practical — warm-toned lighting and yellow lenses do quiet work for anyone with light sensitivity, and I’ve built the room around that.
What’s Deltastring’s is orange, the same orange as the brand. Choosing that orange was more deliberate than it looks; there’s a proper story there involving some informal experiments and a VW press photo, which I’ll write up separately. The MacBook Pro M2 I do client work on, the Fujifilm camera, the Deltastring hat on the shelf. When I’m packing for an offsite I don’t have to think about which laptop to grab. I grab the orange one and that is, by definition, the right answer.
The system extends beyond the room. I wear orange to conferences (not in a hi-vis way, just a jumper or a t-shirt) because the brand should follow me when I leave the building. People often remember the colour before they remember the name. The business cards have orange edges for the same reason: they stick out in someone else’s deck and connect straight back to whoever handed it over.
Two domains, two colours, no ambiguity. It is the most useful organisational habit I have ever picked up and it costs nothing.
Two: you don’t do good work with a banging headache
I spend a lot of time in environments I can’t control: client offices, expos, conference halls, motorway service stations, the back seat of a car at six in the morning. All of those places do their own thing with light and reflection and colour temperature, and most of them do it badly.
This room is the one place I can control all of that, so I do, aggressively. The colour temperature of the bulbs is matched. The blind is the right colour and the right opacity. Reflective surfaces are angled away from monitors. The yellow on the walls and on my glasses is the same calm colour my eye has stopped noticing, which is exactly the point. It does its work as background.
The reason for all of this is straightforward. You don’t do good work with a banging headache. The hours I’m not in here, my eyes are doing visual work in places that don’t get a vote. The hours I am in here, I want zero friction.
Three: the room is a stage
When I’m on a video call I don’t sit at the desk. I sit on the other side of the room with the MacBook Pro M2 balanced on the keyboard stand, looking back across the room toward the desk. The window throws good light onto my face, and the desk (lit, decorated, considered) becomes the camera background. The cupboards and exit doors are behind me, where nobody can see them.
The Mac mini M4 does the work; the MacBook does the calls. The Mac mini doesn’t have a webcam connected (I could rig the Fujifilm but it overheats; an action cam isn’t ideal either) and the MacBook earns its place on the desk for that reason alone.
Once you accept the room is a stage, you start using the set. When I’m discussing a new contract I make sure the things visible behind me are the things that lead to the right conversations. The trinkets aren’t there for me. They’re there because every single one of them has, at some point, been spotted by someone on a call and turned into a question; questions about what you do are the cheapest, warmest leads you will ever get.
What’s not in the photo
A few things didn’t make the frame, or are tucked too deep to point at:
- Mac mini M4, hidden behind the monitors. The brain of the desk setup. Runs everything: build pipelines, test processes, periodic LaunchAgents, the lot. Huge compute, low electricity, bargain price. Almost everything I do touches it before it touches the cloud.
- TCL Android phone with an NXTPAPER screen, used as an always-visible calendar and as a deliberately-different test platform for anything that touches a phone.
- Netac external SSDs. One per client project, each project’s data on its own physical drive. Total isolation is part of our policy. We work with fintech companies; you can’t be too careful, and when a project ends the drive goes to the cold-storage shelf and stays there.
- Sony lavalier mics, several pairs of headphones, various Raspberry Pis in different states of project, a Dymo labelmaker which keeps everything organised aggressively, and a USB rechargeable clip-on light I aim at my face for video calls when the natural light goes bad in the afternoon.
- A Black n’ Red notebook for first-draft sketches of flowcharts and processes. Paper is faster than software for the messy version. A whiteboard wheels in for anything bigger.
- A Six Sigma handbook, some Kaizen books, physics textbooks, coding textbooks. I draw on the methodology more than you might expect; I’ll also concede that the spines are easy to read on a Zoom call and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
The trinkets earn their shelf space
Almost everything visible on the right-hand shelves is from someone I’ve worked with, and almost all of it has, at one time or another, started a conversation that led somewhere.
- A Premium Plus sunglasses case from premiumplus.io, the Zendesk specialists.
- A redk water bottle. There were conversations a while ago about me joining the team. It didn’t come together in the end, but they’re good people. Genuinely a great bottle, too. It’s in my hand most days. Nice when the swag turns out to be the real thing.
- Geckoboard bits and pieces celebrating our links with that team.
- Zendesk kit, scattered around. A pair of socks on the shelf (yes, really; Zendesk socks exist) and a properly good umbrella that lives in the car. Zendesk being the platform the practice is built on, and whoever ran their London event clearly knew exactly what their attendees would actually use.
- An Igloo Energy desk organiser, doing useful work keeping the desk in order.
- President Barbie, a gift from my colleagues at Depop, then part of Etsy, after the project there. She earns her shelf space because everyone has heard of those brands and she gives me a way to talk about the work without sounding like I’m reciting a CV. The Salto Lego set on the same shelf is in the same business.
- Lanyards from past expos and a small archaeology of past projects scattered around the rest of the room.
Each one is a conversation starter and I know exactly what each one leads to. Everybody has heard of these brands. Together they give a sense of the work I do without any of the awkwardness of saying it out loud.
Going deeper
The 2026 refresh of Contracting is all in the preparation is coming soon and goes into the what to buy in proper detail: laptops, networks, peripherals, the lot.
If there’s a corner of this room you’d like me to write about properly (the audio chain, the camera setup, the backup strategy, the colour-coding system, the Solix) let me know and I’ll bump it up the queue.
Nobody appreciates the level to which my whole life is engineered, and that’s fine. The work it does is invisible by design. That’s the whole point.