I've made a table that mounts on a tree without any damage the tree, and I code outdoors all day. Now I've put it up on Indiegogo. Here's the story behind it.

I used to code in the New York subways, on my way between to the day job. Hunched over a seat in front, on which I thrust my laptop with a precarious 1-hour battery life, I did my most creative work. The deadline of doing something useful in the one hour that I have made me focus. Is that what you call "meditation"?

That was 20 years ago. Now I have found a new way to be inspired to code. I code in city parks. I like the idea of coding outdoors, and for a while this wasn't possible. Something was always missing: either it was battery power, or it was the internet, or it was the sun glare. Those problems are now solved. I found a lithium battery AC generator that gives me a full day of work. I have LTE internet at a reasonable price through my phone. And I found a good sun shade. So, starting in the Spring, I began working outdoors. That has favorably coincided with Covid lockdowns, but really I wanted to do this for a while.

I began by lugging a table and a chair to my favorite spot in a park. I could pick just the right view, because I wasn't limited by some existing park's table. That worked well. However, I soon found out that working on a cloudy Spring day is too cold when sitting. To overcome this, I converted my setup to a standing desk. Instead of a chair, I lugged a smaller camping table. I put it on top of the normal sized table, and that gave me enough height. Working standing kept blood circulating and I was warm.

As I was looking for a perfect spot and lugging all my heavy gear, I kept looking at trees and thought to myself: "A tree's trunk is like a strong, fat, table leg. If I could get a table mounted on a tree, then I could mount it at any height, so that I can work standing." The downside would be that I could no longer can sit just anywhere I wanted, but only where there's a tree. But I thought that it's worth the trouble, if the Tree Table would be light to carry around in ad-hoc fashion. I headed to Amazon to look for such a table, but couldn't find one. I couldn't even figure out how to search for it. However, when I headed to Google Patent search I found something called "Tree Table". The patent expired in 2001, so I decided to build the table suggested in the patent on my own.

So I did it. I've built a prototype of the Tree Table and started using it. Curious people asked me questions, and I decided that there may be a market for it. I think that other Perl coders ("Monks") will have the same kind of "coding spirit" as me, and would enjoy using a similar setup. I've made the table wide enough to fit a laptop, a laptop stand, a mouse, and a cup of coffee or a book (75cm). You can find it on Indiegogo under the name of "Tree Table".