Setup
The setup
Everything I use day to day, and how the desk got from a broken table to this one. No aspirational gear: if it is listed here, it is on my desk right now.
Featured on workspaces.xyzThey asked about the desk. Here is the whole write up.Desk
1 item
Herman Miller Aeron
The one piece of gear I stopped thinking about the day it arrived.
Mac
5 items
Apple Studio Display XDR
The 2026 one. Mini LED, 120Hz, and one cable to the Mac. The single biggest jump this desk has had.
MacBook Pro M1, 2021
Five years on and it still has not given me a reason to replace it.
MacBook Air M4, 2025
What travels. Light enough that I stopped thinking about whether to bring it.
Logitech MX Keys Mini
Small enough to leave room for the trackpad, quiet enough for calls.
LG UltraFine 5K
Still in service on the second desk. I alternate between the two depending on the day.
Audio
8 items
Shure MV7+
USB and XLR, with the denoiser doing quiet work on the room. Calls, recording, and sounding like a person rather than a laptop.
Audio-Technica ATH-M50x
The pair everyone owns, for good reason. Nothing clever, just right every time.
Sony WH-1000XM5
What goes in the bag. The noise cancelling is the difference between working on a flight and not.
Sennheiser Momentum 4
Long sessions. Comfortable enough to forget about for hours.
AirPods Pro
Everything else. Calls, walks, pretending to be busy.
Sony WF-1000XM4
The in ear pair. What gets used when the over ears are too much.
Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro
From 2022, still in a drawer, still working, still occasionally the right answer.
EPOS Sennheiser Game Zero
Kept around from the gaming years and still the best headset mic I own.
Camera
1 item
Sony ZV-E10
Webcam duty most days, actual camera the rest of the time.
Everyday
8 items
iPhone 17 Pro
Daily driver, and where most of the desk photos come from.
iPhone 13 Pro
The one before this one. Still going, still takes a good photo.
Apple Watch
For the days a mechanical watch cannot tell me to stand up.
iPad, A16
Reading, sketching, and the second screen when I am away from the desk.
Tudor Black Bay 58
The one that gets worn most. Right size, no fuss.
Hamilton Khaki Field Murph
Field watch, legible in the dark, and a good story on the wrist.
Timex Navi Round Automatic
Ref. TW2U99900U9. Black dial, mechanical automatic, 21mm. The one I worry least about.
Seiko panda
The panda dial. Bought because it made me smile in the case.
Drive
3 items
BMW M340i
The daily driver. Straight six, and no speed chime, because I wrote up how to remove it.
BMW steering wheel
Swapped in myself. Photographed mid install, which is the only honest way to show it.
Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy through one I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. I only list things I actually use.
On the move
The other setup, which is no setup
A lot of my work happens between India and Europe, and some of my best hours are the ones in between: a layover, a gap between conference talks, a coffee somewhere near a client's office. No desk, no monitor, no ceremony. A MacBook, a pair of headphones, and nobody able to reach me for three hours. I have moved more than a few mountains in exactly that window. Half the photographs below were taken in it.
How it got here
The desk, backwards
It did not start like this. Most of what I know was learned on a table that was falling apart, and a fair amount of the work since has happened nowhere near a desk at all.
July 2026
Bangalore
Same desk, after dark
One lamp, a live set on the display, and the part of the day when nobody needs anything from me. Most of Loominote has been built in this exact light.
July 2026
Bangalore
Walnut, and a much better display
The custom standing desk: a walnut top on locally sourced motors. The Studio Display replaced the LG, and the watch tray earned its spot next to the plants.
September 2025
No deskOne of the in between hours
A laptop on a low table under a glass roof, somewhere between one thing and the next. These gaps turn out to be where a surprising amount of the work gets done, because nobody can reach you in them.
May 2025
Bangalore
The one that got featured
Featured on workspaces.xyzWalnut live edge top on a standing frame, the LG UltraFine, an Aeron, and a pegboard holding everything that would otherwise be on the desk. The camera is pointed at the chair because half of this job is calls now. The glass partition is why it doubles as a quiet meeting room. This is the one workspaces.xyz came for.
August 2023
Bangalore
A bigger room
The standing desk, the Aeron and the perch stool all made the move. More floor, better light, and the first place that felt like it had been chosen rather than settled for.
May 2023
Bangalore
No deskA meeting from the driver's seat
Parked in Bangalore with the laptop on my knees, in a meeting. Not glamorous, but it was the difference between making the call and missing it.
April 2023
Thailand
No deskAn island in Thailand
Sunset, the sea a few metres away, and a terminal open anyway. Not discipline, just the upside of work that needs a laptop and a signal and nothing else.
March 2023
Bangalore
The nook
The first room that was properly a workspace. Standing desk against the wall, an Aeron, a perch stool for the in between, and a framed print saying this is my happy place. It doubled as a quiet meeting room.
June 2022
Europe
No deskA Starbucks somewhere in Europe
Between one thing and the next, with a coffee and a corner table. A good share of that year happened in rooms I had never been in before and have not been back to since.
January 2022
Bangalore
The first real desk
A MacBook on a stand, a monitor on an arm, a keyboard I chose rather than settled for. The first time the setup was something I built instead of something I put up with.
2017 to 2021
A laptop, and wherever I happened to be
No place of my own, so no desk to speak of. The laptop went where I went, and work happened on trains, in rooms rented by the month, and on a lot of other people's tables. Nothing from those years was worth photographing, which is its own kind of answer.
October 2016
Hometown
The laptop came home, and the desktop stayed
Back in my hometown with the laptop from Kolkata, running it next to the tower rather than instead of it. The external monitor is propped on the box an ASUS motherboard came in, because a motherboard box is exactly the right height and costs nothing. The rubber duck was already doing its job.
May 2016
Kolkata
No deskThe first laptop, on the floor in Kolkata
I had been working on and off from my hometown for about a year, and in May 2016 I moved to Kolkata properly. This was the whole setup: one laptop, no desk, a floor. I learned PHP on it, and that is what turned on and off work into an actual job. Everything after this point follows from that machine.
February 2014
Hometown
A motherboard box as a monitor stand
A UPS on the desk because the power went out most days and I was not losing work to it again. The monitor sat on the box a part had shipped in. Everything on this table was either repurposed or bought secondhand, and all of it worked.
2012
Hometown
A broken table and a single core
A repurposed table that was already falling apart, and a desktop with one core doing all of it. Crappy is the honest word. It is also where I wrote my first software, installed Linux for the first time, broke it, reinstalled it, and played everything that machine could survive. Most of what I know started on this table.