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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It can be kind of a fun experience to try coding something substantive without an Internet connection - say, while riding Caltrain or on a plane flight. It's a very different workflow. You need to download all of your docs ahead of time, and then get used to browsing through them as the doc generator intended. If you get stuck, better dig into the source code of that library you don't know how to use. You end up thinking through your code a lot more, and being more careful and more rigorous about the library calls you use.

I've found it's a pretty handy skillset to have, but for most everyday programming, I'm happy to reach for the search box.

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It's odd that this no-internet workflow is what most of us force on interview candidates.

really? every test I've had allowed me to use the internet. Is this common?

Generally there is not even a computer involved, just a whiteboard.

I used to commute by train regularly and used some of that time to work on a side project. One thing that helped a lot was having a local mirror of the website and documentation for key libraries I was using, which kept a good balance between having access to what I needed and not being distracted.

rel: http://www.devdocs.io has been invaluable for offline documentation.

There's a Mac app called Dash that's good for this purpose as well.

And a Windows one called "Zeal" that's basically a good copy of Dash. Used both, recommended.

Any ideas of a particular project to try while disconnected?

I've been working on a game recently, (https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard) and I've been struck with how refreshingly simple and self-contained it can be compared to a web service. I can still count all my dependencies on one hand instead of pulling in a huge intertangled graph of them, and I nearly always find that when I run into problems, they are of my own making instead of being thrust upon me by 3rd parties.

Granted I need reference documentation for the engine (love2d in my case), and I occasionally consult the Lua stdlib documentation (which I get from apt-get), but that's about it.

I've found that the most effective projects to try disconnected are often the most difficult, in terms of fundamental CS needed. You don't want to do something like a mobile app or realtime Node.js SPA, where the majority of the work is in looking up API calls and debugging why a third-party framework isn't working. That is, unless you really know the technology well...I wrote much of the code for a startup a year or so ago on Caltrain, because it was Django and was like the 4th or 5th Django app I'd written, and didn't really stretch my comfort zone much (technically, at least; the social challenges were new and difficult).

Instead, things like compilers, complex algorithms, data formats, data mining, etc. are good candidates for offline coding. Most of the knowledge for them exists in your head, and the ratio of thinking time vs. reading time is much greater. In the case of data mining & machine learning, there's also a long iterative process that involves looking at your data, coming up with insights, implementing your insights, and evaluating how well it improves the algorithm. If your test data fits on a laptop (not all interesting data does), it's a good candidate for offline development.

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