Treat Your Body Right
Discover how to treat your body right as a programmer by optimizing your workstation setup and practicing ergonomics. Learn to choose the right keyboard and display, improve mouse usage, maintain good posture, and prevent strain injuries. This lesson helps you manage your physical health to support long-term programming productivity and avoid stress-related problems.
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How so many people get injured sitting behind a desk? It’s not like we pull a muscle when trying to lift a heavy line of code or bloody our forehead by whacking into a nasty program fault. Instead, physical injury for programmers is the sum of zillions of small things compounded over time. Repetitive strain and stress-related problems are solvable. Like most problems, they’re best solved before they become a problem. A little bit of attention to the issues now could save us considerable trouble later.
Workstation makeover
Computers are marketed on speed, memory, and sometimes disk space. Never does a manufacturer tout its keyboard. Yet we’re a lot better off with a junker CPU and a keyboard that fits our hand, a display mounted at eye level, and a mouse that tracks well.
Choosing a keyboard
Keyboards are notorious for their badness. Their arrangement of keys has hardly changed since the days of mechanical typebars. Key travel, the distance a key moves up to the down, is often minimal and mushy. Worse, so-called natural shapes often make even less sense than their normal counterparts. Don’t put up with it; buy something that fits us. Usually, the company will reimburse you, but use your ...