Matthew Ruten

In the past couple years, I’ve read many blog posts and news stories about how sitting is killing us, and we were not made to sit stationary for hours at a time. Along with that, more and more people are trying out standing desks, to avoid some of the pitfalls of sitting.

I like the idea of standing desks, but don’t really want to invest any money into it until I try it out, so I hacked one together with stuff I already have:

It’s just a table on a table, with some stuff on the ground to stand on, to reach the right height.

Some initial notes:

• Sore feet! I’ve only spent a few hours standing so far, but my feet get quite sore. Walking around once in a while helps!
• Typing feels much more natural. I think this is the first time I’m actually typing in an ergonomically-correct way, and it feels great!
• I probably need a stand for my monitor, so I don’t have to look down at it.
• I walk around a lot more, and can easily pace back and forth when I need to think about a problem.

Where to go from here?

• Standing desk or not, I need to get an actual desk. The Frederik desk from Ikea is adjustable, so it should work as either a standing or sitting desk.
• I’ll try this out for a few weeks and see how it goes! I only use this computer on evenings and weekends, so it’s not too crazy to stand for those times.

Side note: Also visible in the photo is the exercise ball I was using as a chair previously. 

First of all, I love Github. We use it at work, and it works great. The code browsing, and ability to make quick edits and commit them within Github are awesome features. I’ve been using it for some personal projects, but it quickly gets expensive if you want to host more than 10 repos.

Here’s a quick comparison of the features I care about the most:

The key is unlimited repositories, with only a limit on space. This is perfect for hosting a large amount of small projects. Most of my repos are only a few MB.

It turns out there are a ton of repository hosting sites–Codebase was the only one I found that had a limit on space, instead of number of repositories, and also had extra project features, like time tracking, code browsing/editing, etc.

So the plan for now is to move all my private Github repos to Codebase.

One last option is to host your Git repos on your own server. I looked into a few self-hosted options, Gitorious looks the most promising, but is apparently a bit tricky to install. I’m adding it to the “look in to someday” list.

Links:

• Codebase: http://www.codebasehq.com/
• Github: https://github.com/
• Gitorious Self-Hosted: http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Installation