
Ask HN: with little to no Internet for a year, how can I stay on top of my game? - jbranchaud
I have been writing software both academically and for fun for over 5 years now. In a few weeks I will move to Argentina and live there for a year. I will be living with little to no internet access for this year. At most, I will be able to visit an internet cafe for a couple hours each week.<p>While the internet can be a huge distraction at times, it is also a major resource for software development. How can I stay on top of my game this coming year with such limited access? All suggestions and insights are welcome.<p>Note: I am not looking for some solution to gain access to internet, but rather ways to stay sharp and up-to-date without it.
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malandrew
Learn timeless skills from books. Algorithms. AI, Statistics. Machine
Learning. Compilers. New languages. etc.

Take some excellent timeless source code examples to study. Knuth's TeX for
example.

[http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth](http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/systems/knuth)

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AznHisoka
No internet can sharpen your brain, since you're forced to come up with
solutions rather than Googling for the answer immediately.

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shubhamjain
Making your own solutions is overrated. Why should I create another function
to show time as " x days ago" when it already exists?

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devonbarrett
Lots of books and a subscription to
[http://hackermonthly.com/store.html](http://hackermonthly.com/store.html)
should keep you sane.

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LarryMade2
Back in my day, they had these things called tech magazines... :-D

Secondly, right there are some problems looking for a solution: \- Can you
figure out a way to improve remote internet access... \- Can you work up some
caching mostly off-line reader/browser/email so when you do connect you can
queue in all the stuff you had thought about off-line.

Learning general programming & making a web-dev laptop setup of technologies
you want to hone are a couple good ideas.

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jbranchaud
Again, I am not looking to improve the internet access situation. I do like
the idea of caching stuff for offline access. Are there any tools or services
for doing something like this or would I have to come up with some custom
solutions?

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alirov
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for but you can get some database
dumps that you can browse offline at your leisure. I know Wikipedia offers a
file you can download so does Stack Exchange.

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gus_massa
Where are you going to stay? In which city? Most of the bars in big cities
have wifi.

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PencilAndPaper
Is it really that hard to catch up? I hope not.

