Ask HN: with little to no Internet for a year, how can I stay on top of my game? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: with little to no Internet for a year, how can I stay on top of my game?

5 pointsjbranchaud10 comments

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.

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.

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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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

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

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

This is my hope, we'll see how it works out!

Lots of books and a subscription to http://hackermonthly.com/store.html should keep you sane.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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