
Ask HN: How do you work with slow/metered connection? - chakerb
I leave in an area where there&#x27;s no fiber. We only have ADSL and 4G. usually ADSL is pretty slow, especially during peak hours. And 4G is metered so it start to be a little costly with time. Sometimes I have to download hundred of Megabytes of  dependencies and it takes almost an hour to finish.<p>What are your tricks to manage internet when it&#x27;s slow?
PS: moving to another place isn&#x27;t an option with all things related to COVID-19.
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austincheney
The first time I was in Afghanistan the personal internet was available at
dial up speeds from shared access over a civilian satellite dish. Think 56kbps
speeds with high packet loss and occasional service interruption. I was there
for a year so you just learn to make due. To complicate matters I was
frequently traveling and when traveling I had no personal internet, so I would
have to plan wisely and download everything I needed before going on my next
work adventure.

> Sometimes I have to download hundred of Megabytes of dependencies

I refuse to do that even now. I make two exceptions:

1) ESLint is a really nice package, but has a sickening number of
dependencies. I don't update ESLint very often and because I use it enough I
just use it anyways. I always install it globally instead of including it in
my projects because of its dependency bloat.

2) At work the team might make a horrible decision and force usage of
AngularJS, or something equally stupid. If they want to waste my time with
that stupidity then so be it. I get paid to sit there all the same.

My various trips to Afghanistan have largely shaped how I program. Back in
that day I thought jQuery at about 65k was horribly excessive, and now you
could require 300mb of packages to write a page of HTML. I won't do it even
though I have gigabit internet at the house.

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detaro
If possible, I work on a remote machine with a faster connection, if that
results in less traffic and is comfortable.

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chakerb
Yeah, this is quite interesting indeed. However, currently I require a
powerful machine in my day to day work. I considered renting a Hetzner machine
as they are reasonably priced specs compared to AWS.

~~~
detaro
In my case right now it's my workstation back at the office, but yes, renting
also is an option. Something expensive cloud-based could still make sense over
a rented dedicated box if you always shut it down when not in use, but you
need to run the math on that.

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zhte415
Change work-flow?

Figure out what you need in dependencies and set up a job to run overnight
when you're asleep and/or at lunchtime or dinner time when you'd be
eating/cooking, or any other idle time like a bit of exercise?

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m_a_g
I think Desktop as a Service (DaaS) providers can solve your problem.

