In this stay-home time, I started making coffee at home last November. I’m quite happy with this new hobby and wanted to share the fun here.

My coffee history

I was not a coffee person. My regular drinks at Starbucks in Tokyo were chai latte in the winter and matcha frappuccino in the summer. I had cappuccinos (or cappuccini!) at non-Starbucks cafes, but I never made coffee at home.

I started drinking more coffee in Berlin. Big espresso machines were introduced in the office a few years ago. My colleagues were excited. I bought Nespresso pods and joined the coffee time.

Many coffee shops in Berlin serve specialty coffee. I met something stronger than a cappuccino. Flat white became my regular drink.

Espresso machine

The last November, my wife and I bought De’Longhi Dedica EC685 for 153.90 €. It’s an entry-level espresso machine with good reviews. We wanted to start small because we were not sure if we wouldn’t get bored.

It came with almost everything necessary for making a cup of cappuccino—a milk jug, baskets, and a tamper with a scoop on the other end. Well, you still need to buy coffee beans and milk though.

I’m trying to make a flat white. Roughly speaking, it’s a double espresso with steamed milk on top.

Making espresso is easy—at least to satisfy my less educated taste. Put ground coffee into the basket in the handle, set the handle into the espresso machine, and press a button. That’s it.

Steamed milk is harder. Decica’s milk foam is coarser than more professional ones’. There are a few ways to improve it, but I haven’t tried any of them yet. I’ll try the cable tie trick soon.

Many online reviews pointed out that Dedica EC685 suddenly stopped working after a few months and required a factory reset to recover. It happened to ours once. But it was not an issue because we already knew the trick.

Coffee beans

I live in a neighborhood famous for gentrification. In walking distance, there are a few coffee roasters and countless coffee shops that sell specialty coffee beans. The Barn, Five Elephant, Friedl, Firstcrack, MokannTi, Coffee Stars, oh my.

I still don’t know what kind of beans I like. I’m exploring different beans one by one and looking for my favorite. My current focus is making coffee properly. Otherwise, my poor coffee-making skills diminish the difference in coffee beans.

Grinder

There are much more options if you can grind whole beans by yourself. After a month with the espresso machine, we weren’t bored yet. So we decided to invest in a grinder.

Not all grinders can grind coffee finely enough for espresso. Also, people on the internet say grinders are more important than espresso machines. But automatic grinders for espresso easily cost a few hundred euros at least. A bit too much for a beginner.

We opted for a good-quality hand grinder, Porlex, at 64.90 €. It’s made in Kagoshima, a southwest part of Japan. Its ceramic blades are easy to clean. It requires some force to rotate the handle, but it’s been working well so far.

An alternative was Comandante from Germany. It had a good reputation on the internet, but 228 € was out of our budget.

Grinding coffee is meditating. It brings analog vibes to my mostly digitalized life.

Latte art

To me, latte art is one of coffee’s biggest wonders. Baristas draw beautiful patterns only by pouring milk into coffee! It looks easy when skilled baristas do it, but it’s not.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million words—especially for crafts like cooking and latte art. How to Pour Latte Art by Prima Coffee Equipment is the best video I have found so far. It was eye-opening to see how the barista pushed a circle into an arc, and he raised the milk jug before making a stroke at the end.

Also, coffee cups make a difference here. We started with small cylinder-shaped mugs that we had at home, but it didn’t go well. After we got bowl-shaped coffee cups, the bigger surface made it easier to pour milk on the surface.

Well, there’s still a long way to go!

Here are some tips that I learned through my own mistakes. I’m not an expert, and I know I’m late to the train. But I hope you find some of the tips useful!

Start from your body

Find furniture and equipment that fit your body. Not the other way around. I made a mistake on it when I bought my standing desk.

To have a good posture, check the following requirements:

• Chair: Your feet should rest flat on the floor when you sit deep.
• Desk: Your elbows should be at 90 degrees or more when you type on your keyboard.
• Monitor: Your monitor’s top edge should be around your eye-level.

These three constraints define the ideal sizes and positions of your chair, desktop, and monitor.

Besides that, you can find tons of resources on the internet if you search for office ergonomics. I found the CUErgo website particularly informative.

Chair

Your feet should rest flat on the floor when you sit deep. It’s not hard to achieve because most office chairs are height-adjustable. But pay attention to the range of the seat level before you buy one.

Good chair is worth your money

When I started working from home, I ordered the cheapest chair in stock at the time to satisfy my minimum needs. The chair looked OK, but its seat was too stiff. I nearly got hemorrhoids after a few weeks. I had to buy a donut-shaped seat cushion to get around the issue. But it didn’t support my weight well and caused back pain.

Eventually, I decided to go with Aeron Chair Remastered, and I love it. It’s not cheap, but it’s much better than getting health problems.

Desk

Your elbows should be at 90 degrees or more when you type on your keyboard. This arrangement requires careful planning. Few desks are height adjustable. Even adjustable desks have their minimum/maximum heights. If you can’t get a desk of your perfect height, you can a keyboard tray to lower your keyboard or footrest to elevate yourself.

Check the minimum height before buying a standing desk

I bought a standing desk, Flexispot E1, because I saw Flexispot on many blog posts in Japan and E1 was the most affordable one. It turned out that its minimum height 71 cm was too high for me. It took me a while to realize it because it’s a standing desk. More expensive models of Flexispot have lower minimum heights. For example, E5 can go down to 62 cm.

To work around the issue, I ordered a keyboard tray from Flexispot. The keyboard tray lowered the position of my keyboard and created more space on my desktop. I was happy that I was able to open a book between my keyboard and monitor. But the keyboard tray came with its problems. Typing hard on it shook the desk itself. It revealed the desk’s instability. On top of that, the tray was unstable by itself because its screws were quite loose.

A good side effect was that I stopped resting my palms on wrist rests when I type. It was advice from the CUErgo website and an attempt to reduce the wobble of my desk and monitor. Now my monitor doesn’t wobble and I can type faster.

Stability matters

If you are getting a standing desk, get a stable one!

Stability is especially important if you use a big monitor and a monitor arm. I tried a 32-inch monitor once with a monitor arm and had to return it because it wobbled too much on the standing desk.

btod.com has stability reviews of standing desks.

If I buy a standing desk again, I would try IKEA’s Idasen.

Monitor

I’m using a 27-inch QHD monitor now after trying 24-inch and 32-inch. 32-inch was too big for me.

Monitor height

Your monitor’s top edge should be around your eye-level. Usually, the built-in stands of regular monitors don’t go high enough. A stack of books, a monitor stand, or a monitor arm elevate your monitor. If you use a keyboard tray, you need less monitor elevation because you can keep your desktop higher.

Before buying anything, check whether your setup can satisfy your monitor’s perfect height. If you are getting a monitor arm, check the relative position of your monitor’s VESA mount to its top. Not all monitors have their VESA mounts at their center.

I’m using Flo from Colebrook Bosson Saunders. I’m satisfied with the beautiful monitor arm so far. Its maximum height is just enough for my eye-level. You may need a more robust one if you need more height or a bigger monitor.

Inside your screen

You don’t need to fill your screen with windows. My neck hurts if I stare at a corner of my screen for a long time. But I often found myself in this neck-bending situation. It helps if you keep your working area at the top center of your screen.

I stopped using applications in full screen or multi-window layout. I put my browser window in the half-width of my screen and put it at the center. Instead of showing multiple windows, I keep only one window at a time and switch windows with a keyboard shortcut. This single-window policy allows me to always look in front of me and focus on one thing at a time.

Vim

Goyo is a Vim plugin that creates a focus mode. The plugin hides non-essential elements and places the text at the center. The focus mode helps you not only focus, but also keep you face the center of the screen.

If Goyo provides horizontal adjustment, z<CR> provides vertical adjustment. The normal-mode command brings the current line to the top of your screen. It helps you keep your neck straight.

Terminal

Can we create the Goyo-like focus mode outside of Vim? This cool trick on SuperUser allows you to create a focus mode on tmux. You can also move up your eyes to the top of your screen by clear on your terminal.

Move!

Even with all of the above, my body doesn’t feel well if I stay in front of my computer all day. I go out for a walk every day, and it makes a difference. Ergonomic setup doesn’t mean you can work all day.

It’s already been two weeks in 2021, but I’ll write anyway in the spirit of better late than never.

2020 was finally over. It was a weird year. Time flies, but things that happened feels like a long time ago.

Work

I had been working in the same area as before at Zalando. But I was not bored. My team welcomed new members. I helped building a brand new product. I was promoted. The new role exposed me to new perspectives even though I left before fully embracing it. Thanks to the remote work as the default, I collaborated with colleagues in Dublin more closely than ever.

At the end of November, I left Zalando where I met wonderful colleagues and friends. The four years there became an important part of my life.

After a week of vacation, I started a new job at Google. I am currently working remotely from Berlin. But I will eventually relocate to Zurich when the situation improves. My current plan is to move at the end of March, but we never know.

This job change took longer than I thought. I applied in February and heard a result in June, but most of the positions were canceled due to COVID-19. It took a few more months to find a team to join. I received an offer at the end of August.

A new job means a lot of learning. Now I’m experiencing how it feels to join a new place. I haven’t had this feeling for a while. I tended to think that software engineers should thrive on depths. But I missed that we needed an overview before pursuing depths.

I just finished an onboarding program. I’m excited to catch up and start contributing to real projects.

WfH

I had been working from home 100% since February. I liked to go to the office and talk to colleagues in person. But I also like working from home.

It didn’t take long to adapt to working remotely. We were already working cross-location with Dublin and Helsinki using online collaboration tools like GitHub, Google Meet/Chat/Docs. It became even easier to attend meetings than before. Instead of climbing upstairs to go to a meeting room, meetings are only a few clicks away.

The problem was physical equipment. I didn’t realize that the office equipment was very nice before starting WfH. I bought tons of things to set up a comfortable home office—I may write more about this later.

No commuting means huge time-saving. I saved at least one and a half hours every day. At the same time, I lost a good chance of exercise. I try to walk outside every day, but the amount of my physical activities drastically decreased.

Computer science

It was fun to learn and practice algorithms and data structures for interview preparation. I solved about 300 Medium/Hard LeetCode problems in two months. Before 2020, I had been learning them with books and Coursera courses, but knowing and doing are two different things. Solving problems shed light on what I didn’t fully understand. I studied topics that I was stuck—graphs, dynamic programming, string searching, well, most of them!

After the interviews, I still wanted to learn more. Someone on Twitter tweeted about Teach Yourself Computer Science. I started with Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces because it looked easy to read—and it was. Then I moved on to Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective. The book is more textbook-ish than OSTEP. But I found it fun to learn things that I hadn’t taken a deeper look at—the binary representation of floating-point numbers, assembly, processors, etc.

Travel

Before COVID-19 started, I traveled to Granada, Spain in January. It’s a city of Alhambra—and free tapas. The city’s bars give you tapas as long as you order drinks. Seafood and Jamón ibérico were so good.

In September between the two lockdowns of the spring and the winter, I visited Goslar, Quedlinburg, and Düsseldorf in Germany to use too many vacation days left. Goslar and Quedlinburg were beautiful. As a substitute for a trip to Japan, I ate Japanese food extravagantly in Düsseldorf. My favorite restaurant was Hyuga. It felt like being at an izakaya in Tokyo. Shochiku, a Japanese supermarket, had a fish counter where you can ask them to cut sashimi. I took it out and ate in the hotel room. So good.

Food and drinks

I had rarely used food deliveries before 2020. But yes, I did it this time. My favorite dishes have been Tacos and Korean fried chicken. Also, many restaurants started take-away. I had never imagined taking out ramen before 2020.

I kept drinking bubble tea. Dosha in Friedrichshain is my favorite in Berlin so far. In addition to authentic Taiwanese tea, they have waffles with Tapioca inside!

Then, winter came. Even though warm bubble tea is nice, it became tedious to go out on the cold street to grab drinks. I finally bought an entry-level espresso machine and a hand grinder. My less educated taste is already satisfied with it. Let’s see if I can make some latte art in 2021.

Books

I bought 42 books or so but finished only a few non-tech books. Much less than I thought. One was Into The Wild. The others were two volumes about fermented beans, natto in Japanese, around the world even though I’m scared of its smell and haven’t tried it yet.

I want to read more in 2021. I will cut the time on social media and read books instead. If you want to see the progress and my ever-growing Tsundoku collection, here is my Goodreads account.

2021

I’ll move to another country this year. We can’t socialize in person under the current circumstances, but you know, remote meetings are a few clicks away ;)