Gear Up for Remote Work on a Budget
Tags: developer, remote, productivity, covid
Published: 2020-03-24 22:28:36

---
title: Gear Up for Remote Work on a Budget
published: true
description: A guide to budget gear for setting up your at-home office
tags: developer, remote, productivity, covid
cover_image: https://source.unsplash.com/brsCS7X-Ugg/1000x420
---

# Gear Up for Remote Work on a Budget

![Work from home](https://media.giphy.com/media/mCRJDo24UvJMA/giphy.gif)

With many of us working remotely during this Covid-19 crisis, you may be thinking of setting up a good home workspace.

You may make of your bed an at-home office, though it may sound compelling, it's not the most productive of all. If you are spending hours coding in bad posture, you risk developing backaches instead of web apps.
You may feel sleepy. Therefore, you're likely to be much less productive.

That being said, setting up your remote workspace doesn't have to break the bank.

There are a lot of options out there. I chose to focus on this article, about a few on-budget alternatives for your at-home furniture.

I used a couple of the products below myself and they served me very well, so here you go.

## Laptop: Macbook Pro Mid-2015 ~$1500

![Macbook Pro](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/cuge02lyd7tewp1f5g59.jpg)

I know what you're thinking! This is not future-proof and won't survive with all the memory-intensive tasks that a developer has to do on a daily basis.

Let me tell you, until the recently released 16-inch Macbook Pro, this is considered by many to be the last great MBP, Apple have produced.

It's packed with 16GB of RAM. a Core i7 processor and 256 GB SSD worth of storage space. But best of all, it has all the ports you might need. 

This one is a bit hard to find at the time of writing, but if you do, it should be around $1500 or less if it's in new unopened condition.

## Monitor: Dell Ultrasharp 24" $217 (bhphotovideo.com)

![Dell monitor](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/gceinriof09hqdf8hba2.jpg)

You wanna have a good monitor to navigate your codebase, view mockups and watch videos when necessary. To keep a good posture, it should be easy to adjust to eye level. Bonus points if it also supports vertical viewing, as it comes helpful if you often edit long lines of code.

Dell Ultrasharp U2415 is a decent choice if you're looking for a compact monitor. It comes with an adjustable stand. Its widescreen 1920x1200 resolution offers enough screen real-estate with pretty good picture quality.

## Headphones: Mixcder E9 $55.99 (mixcder.com)

<img src="https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/kz0tvf6t8gu23cgkb0fy.jpg" alt="headphones" width="650"/>
*via: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/mixcder/e9-wireless*

This one is less known unlike its more expensive Bose and Sony counterparts. Still, it's, surprisingly, a decent headphone for the office, overall. It's wireless (yet comes with a cable). It has noise-canceling capability thanks to its ANC system. Its design is quite comfortable to wear for hours and lasts for a good 18 hours with ANC on.

I, myself, am doing my best during this crisis, working from home for the first time. If you think there are more products that would be a good addition, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe!

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