

Thanks HN - pace
http://removed.posterous.com/thanks-hn

======
bane
If you live in the Northern Virginia Area, you can hit the phenomenal Johnson
Center at George Mason University.

Private group rooms (with whiteboards), a semi-isolated reference area for
even more quiet, couches, coffee tables, power at most tables, a movie
theater, coffee bar, cafeteria (with everything from a taco bell to chinese
food), convenience store, two banks (last I checked), a pretty good uni book
store, art exhibitions, a halfway decent restaurant on the top floor and a
computer store, parking decks are pretty close and relatively cheap.

If even has a private prayer area in case you need to call to a higher power
for help with a particularly difficult bug.

Wifi requires you to be a student (last I checked), but tether to your phone
and you're pretty much all set.

If you're working with a distributed team and don't want to shell out $3-4
grand a month on office space, just pay for parking once or twice a week and
use this facility.

(also, if the Johnson Center is full-up, there's always the Fenwick library
across campus that can be even more private since fewer people use it, and I
believe most of the technical reference books are stored in the stacks there)

------
petercooper
Is being able to work in a university library as a member of the public
standard practice in Germany? (Or is the poster an alumnus, perhaps?) I'd love
to do that here in the UK but they're key-carded to the hilt.

~~~
impendia
I can't speak for Germany, but in the United States practices vary. You can't
just walk into the library at the University of Wisconsin, but at North
Carolina State you can.

~~~
matsur
You _can_ just walk into the library at the University of Wisconsin. There is
only one library on the Madison campus (Memorial Library) that requires an ID
to enter. That leaves 49 other libraries on campus open to anyone.

~~~
impendia
Fair enough, I was thinking of Memorial. And, for that matter, I was thinking
of one particular library at NC State which may have been for math and science
only.

~~~
LeafStorm
Nah, at NC State, D. H. Hill (the main library) is open to the public during
normal hours. The "satellite libraries" are Design, Textiles, Natural
Resources, and Veterinary Medicine, and I'm not sure whether those are open
access or not.

I also don't know whether the new Hunt Engineering Library is going to be
public access or not, but I hope it will be because it's going to be awesome.

------
bergie
Getting into a place where Internet connectivity is either not available or is
very spotty helps. I've done some of my best programming in trains.

Sure, not having access to documentation sucks, but not having access to HN
and Twitter compensates for it well :-)

~~~
zdw
When I'm disconnected, I tend to just leave a bunch of comments in code with
_ONLINE_ in them and what I need to look up and recover my train of thought.

I then switch to working on a different part of the program, or a different
program altogether, and come back to them when I'm next online.

This has worked pretty well for me so far, as long as I'm not under a time
crunch.

~~~
bergie
That is a good point. Another tag like _TODO_ and _FIXME_ :-)

I've noticed that I eventually get "push anxiety" when I work offline for
longer periods. Once we even had to do a detour on a road trip from Poland to
Helsinki to stop by a colleague's office in Sweden to be able to push code I
had written on the way. I guess I simply don't trust my laptop...

~~~
xer0
Push anxiety, excellent.:w I suffer from write anxiety.:w I've been helping
someone learn to program,:w and as I watch him write code I feel more tense
the longer he goes:w without writing his file.:w When I mentioned this as a
matter of human interest,:w and as an introduction to why you should save
often,:w he laughed.:w I'm quite confident I will have the last laugh on him
before he truly learns that lesson.:wq

------
yurka
In my experience, simply changing environments may cause an increase in
productivity. Even if the new environment isn't strictly better, you still get
a boost until you get acclimated. This might be crazy, but some sort of random
rotation between various work environments might yield a sustained improvement
in productivity.

~~~
shabble
There's the fairly well-established Hawthorne Effect[1] when applied to
measuring productivity in others, but I'm not sure how well it would apply to
self-analysis since you actually know the details of what you're studying.

Quoting:

 _Changing a variable usually increased productivity, even if the variable was
just a change back to the original condition. However it is said that this is
the natural process of the human being to adapt to the environment without
knowing the objective of the experiment occurring._

Unless you're measuring against some concrete metric though, there's potential
for misinterpreting a feeling of increased productivity vs actually achieving
it. Also, you may be more motivated since you _know_ you're measuring your
output.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>

------
khalidmbajwa
I have a proper fully equipped office at home, and a designated workplace for
the company i run where developers i work with operate. I instead prefer to
work from Coffe Shops simply because they offer distractions at such a minimum
threshold. It works for me because A) Crappy Wi-Fi : So i can't stream Youtube
or Hulu or download movies or Tv-Series yet not bad enough for me to be able
to look up online documentation, parse through StackOverFlow, hold voice calls
over Skype or make SVN commits. B) My external hard disks that contain the
bulk-load of my sources of distractions, are no longer a moment's click away.
C)No useless camaraderie, noone ambling by your desk to engage you in menial
distracting conversations. It's just me , and my Macbook. D)For about 10$ (Two
coffes per day), i get a serene and beautifully decorated place, that's hot in
winters, cold in summers,complete with a comfy Sofa and a little table all my
own, and for what is a sheer bonus in this part of the world, no power
interruptions ! (7+ hours of no power is regular over here in summers).

If i feel a need to have one of my devolepers or my designer collaborate with
me more closely than Skype voice calls can afford, i prefer to call them over
to the coffee shop rather than go over to the office.It works for the kind of
work i do.It may not for everyone. It's cheap, it's comforting, and it's
completely distraction free. I get more done in 3 hours over here than in 10
at any other place.

------
snth
In my experience, almost any productivity "treatment" works at first, until
you get used to it. But, I hope I'm wrong and this continues to work out for
you.

------
ajpatel
LoL I always think this will work then I remember WiFi speeds suck compared to
my UVerse connection and so I stay at home and the cycle repeats.

Glad you made it work though :)

~~~
pace
Worse: I couldn't get into the WLAN (students only), so I could only use my
phone's Internet connection w/384Kbit/s -- but that was good, you get so
effective with such a low bandwidth (using Google's mobile client, doing only
must searches etc.)

------
hhastings
Lmao. Love the ending.

