« I prefer small monitors over big monitors

Having big monitors seems like a must have these days in software development.

I never liked them, I remember having this conversation with Felix and Graham years ago, I didn’t change my opinion, I am actually writing a blog post to reinforce my believes.

Big is bad

Big is bad because a big monitor is a wall between you and your team, with a couple of 21+ monitors in front of you I bet you can’t neither see anymore your colleagues face, it blocks conversations.

Big will tempt you to write less readable code, longer, larger code base with more space on the screen you will be tempted in doing it.

Small is awesome

We all work here with mac laptops, I am pretty happy with a 12” mac, I don’t miss a huge monitor, I can move my mac around the office, I can see the face of my colleagues.

Some tools are not helping you: tools such as visual studio, eclipse and intellij require a lot of not so necessary space on the screen, I admit that with those tools it would be hard; using textmate, emacs or vim you will be fine.

Small is eco-friendly, you can’t argue with this one.

Where big is still good

As information radiator or for your home tv, that’s it.