Example for my desktops setup for web application development over the last couple of years:
1. Browser with the product I'm currently working on, nothing else
2. Shells for all sorts of small tasks like tailing a log to REPLs for quick experimentations
3. Application IDE(s)
4. SQL IDE
5. Music player
6. Communication (Mail, slack, etc.) and secondary browser for miscellaneous things
The greatest thing for me is, that what I'm currently doing is in full focus and everything else basically doesn't exist. No notifications dinging in peripheral vision or other distractions. Also it is nice, that when I switch to laptop only, the workflows are exactly the same just with more limited screen space = less tiles I can use.
If for a given tasks it is beneficial to have things side by side, it is just a couple of key strokes to re-arrange windows and or create an ad-hoc desktop until the task is finished.
Of course I could use multiple desktops and tiled windows on multiple screens, but from my experiments it added more complexity that benefits.
I would rather go for a bigger, higher quality screen than adding another.
So, you could use a 27 inch 4k display at 16:9 aspect ratio (which is 3840 by 2160 pixels) in a way that gets you the native resolution which results in much more usable space but the displayed quality isn't all that great. You can run them at 2560x1440 rendering which sacrifices some pace for much improved quality. Works well when you don't sit super close to your screen. Or, if you like more space but still have a little better quality than the jagged mess that is the native resolution, you could run it at 3008x1692. Close to fully usable space but still way better in terms of quality.
The scale of your computer rendered interface and text versus the actual pixel size and density on your display gives you a balance to choose from for space vs. quality. Which one works best is a combination between physical distance to the screen and personal preference (which mostly forms based on cognitive load).
I kinda regret not getting 2x 1440p monitors with similar picture quality for less money.
Meanwhile it makes using Linux a giant pain in the ass, unless you go all-in on a major desktop on a major distro, and then also get lucky. Possibly I'd have a better opinion of it if I were using it with macOS rather than Win10 and Linux.
[EDIT] and OMG lacking auto-temp-control based on surrounding light has me really wishing I'd just put the monitor cash toward an iMac. Way more eye strain.
Everyone seems to prefer it. They don't have to stop what they are doing at exactly 10am, and they can re-read things that are relevant and skip things that are not easily. There is also a bit more personal accountability because everyone can see what was said in previous days.
With every recurring meeting no matter the frequency you have to be quite careful in my opinion and constantly re-evaluate and tweak to keep it useful most of the time, instead it being a dogmatic ritual that has to be done a specific way because somebody learned it as such from an "Agile" book, certificate, course, video.
People rarely understand the point of agile and, specifically, standups. Using it as a daily check in, especially as status updates, is contrary to agile's intentions. The real purpose is to make sure that people on the team frequently expose problems. If people are already doing that consistently, then standup as a practice is fairly moot.
I think there is an useful status update component to standups. Not to your boss, to have a shared view among the team what the state of the product is. But this has to be aligned with how fast to product is meaningfully changing. Some times this might indeed be daily, but otherwise it quickly becomes just noise.
Of course some managers think the product has to or can meaningfully change every day.
I agree, that if you do them you should make them about exposing problems.
One monitor for code, one for the browser (and devtools window) and a third for everything else (an API document, or a spec, a control for the music I'm streaming or a chat window etc.)
I've found the same setup works really well for any workflow that involves making a small change and immediately seeing the result.
sloppy focus is way more helpful than multiple monitors. You can have your editor largely obscured by documentation (or the other way around) and still type. This is especially nice with modern UIs which seem to think wasting screen real estate with white space and ribbons is an important recent innovation.
Then I upgraded to 3 displays, it's much better. Because I have an explicit main display.
So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them. Put the main one in the center, and pretend the other doesn't exist. Once you really want to use the other display, instead of for the sake of utilizing them only, you'll know it.
Main task in the main display, docs and other references on the left display and email/messages on the right. Works wonderfully.
I’m so used to this setup that when I go to my real job and am constrained to a single monitor I feel like I’m looking through a periscope at my work.
I did that before switching to single display after having multiples from the first day of my career onwards. But I didn't even had to try. By the end, because of how my work and setup has evolved, the second display was switched off 99% of the time.
So when I have the choice I put the entire budget into an ever better single monitor, rather than splitting it.
With that being said, I ended up with 3 monitors in my apartment because I bought them incrementally across 3 years(though they're the same model). And also I play video games from time to time, for most of the games, it's better to have 3 monitors instead of an ultrawide one.
Though when a task only needs one screen for more than a couple of minutes to stay focused shutting off the other screens does help.
I agree with the grandparent poster that the Windows situation is very bad compared to something like i3.
I highly recommend using multiple desktops with dedicated hotkeys over alt+tab to switch between applications. Much much faster to press fn+cmd+<h, j , k, l> and immediately bring up the application you want than to tab until you find the application you are looking for.
Also very useful: the windows-key shortcut overview that the PowerToys added (keep the windows-keypressed for a second or two to bring it up).
I only use W10 as a secondary OS and never used windows as main since XP/2000. So far never got to dig deeper into this. It seems to me that out of the box a lot of the functionality is there, but there are also a lot of related third party (often paid) tools.
What are some good combination of tools (third party, paid or not) and settings for a more keyboard centric i guess you could call it, setup of Windows? At the moment to me it feels a bit like, that I could do everything with just keyboard but I'm not meant to.
Maybe some people benefit from this but I’ve always found it distracting and in some cases a bit annoying. I’ve always preferred simply having multiple desktops and switching between them instantly with a keystroke which is great in most Linux DEs/WMs but a terrible experience in Windows. It’s gotten to a point where even though I have 2 displays, I just turn one off 99% of the time.