Most people assume I’m joking when I say I code on a 14-inch laptop with no external monitor.
Then they see my setup, one screen, a split terminal, and Vim, and they ask how I survive.
Truth is, I didn’t always. I used to have the whole cockpit: dual 24s, browser open wide, logs on one side, docs on the other, Slack buzzing in the corner. It felt productive. Like sitting in front of a control panel, everything glowing.
But I was scattered.
I’d jump between tabs, glance at the error, open five Stack Overflow threads, lose track of what I was doing. Context switching was constant. Half the time, I wasn’t debugging, I was just navigating.
Then my second monitor broke. And I didn’t replace it.
At first, it was frustrating. Less space meant fewer tabs, less visibility, more alt-tabbing. But something else happened too: I got slower… and more deliberate.
I stopped having everything visible all the time, so I had to choose. Read the error carefully. Reproduce it once. Think before Googling. Write notes. Trace with intention. My flow got deeper, even if it looked smaller.
And weirdly, I started enjoying it.
Constraints, it turns out, sharpen your instincts. With less room to spread out, you pack tighter. You write smaller functions, compose better names, avoid clutter, because you’re the one who has to scroll through it.
I think there’s a myth in tech that more tools, more screen space, more everything means better work. But sometimes it just means more distractions. More margin to lose the thread.
Small screens don’t make you better. But they make you notice.
And in noticing, what fits, what matters, what’s essential, you begin to write not just code, but clarity.
That’s the part no one sees on your screen.
But it’s the part that changes how you build.