

Ask HN: Developers - Staying productive whilst offline? - joe-stanton

How do you stay productive as a developer without constant access to the internet?
I&#x27;m going travelling soon and internet is very slow and expensive.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of ideas to mitigate issues such as as:<p><pre><code>  - Access to documentation
  - Availability of Gems&#x2F;Packages I may need in future
  - Developing against API&#x27;s which I won&#x27;t have access to etc.
  - Getting stuck?
</code></pre>
Seems like lots of you guys work on a plane, I assume some of the same tips apply!
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atrilumen
Lately I've been stuck in waiting rooms a lot, taking both of my parents and
my three kids to medical and dental and vision appointments. I always take my
laptop along and try to keep things moving forward.

A lot of these places don't have public wifi, and I've noticed that most of
the time it's not a problem for me.

I've been working on games in Unity, which ships with all the docs so they are
available offline. The only real problem I've had is one of comfort: poor
seating and lighting, nauseating muzak, and often a multitude of varieties of
old lady perfume and hair spray. It's funny, however, how all of that kinda
melts away when I put on my headphones and get focused on what needs to be
done.

I mostly stay tuned out of social media, HN, reddit, etc. when working anyway,
but if those things are a distraction, then (of course) working offline might
actually be more productive.

So, as I'm sure you've already thought out, you need to set up an offline
development environment. Maybe you can identify some chunks of work that don't
require access to inaccessible API's for when you are offline. And some API's
can be setup locally, like App Engine.

The constraints of developing offline might also present a unique opportunity
to design an application that is more fault tolerant; one that does something
sensible when network resources are unavailable.

Have fun traveling. I'm very jealous.

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joe-stanton
Just to throw something useful I found out there, the app 'Dash' for OS X is
really great for offline documentation.

[http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash)

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informatimago
<irony>forget it. Either you have access to StackOverflow, or you will come
back with a strong case of NIH, having implemented something that already
exited (or that's just newer).</irony>

