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Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

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Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#61

Post by soperj »

anyfactor wrote: post #57
soperj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't realistically do programming without Google these days. This is really not true. Try it. It's not that hard, and will likely make you a better programmer.

The thing is that, it is not hard rather, I believe it is unproductive. Learning programming in my opinion is having an understanding of a problem, an abstract idea of a solution and then zigzagging and tumbling across that solution with code. The end goal is providing a programmatic solution to a problem. The issue is that coding and googling provides the experience of journey across a solution. Hence the zigzag. Yo…

> This kind of efficient feedback loop helps you learn

I feel like this helps you solve the problem, but doesn't actually help you learn. The time you're "wasting" trying to find a solution is time you're actually spending learning, not just learning how to code, but learning how to actually formulate a solution. Failure is also one of the biggest parts of learning. "Very hacky programming" is just a start, it's like a vomit draft of anything you're writing. Revisiting your code and figuring out what you can do better is how you end up with more eloquent code.

In my experience, no one really explores when googling for answers, they are just searching for an answer.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#62

Post by vector_rotcev »

smackay wrote: post #31
mtmail wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://devdocs.io/offline can also download 600 documentation sets into the browser. I don't know how reliable it is over several months "Note: your browser may delete DevDocs's offline data if your computer is running low on disk space and you haven't used the app in a while."

If you're using firefox, create a separate profile and add devdocs documentation to it. That keeps your docs isolated from general browsing and so you reduce the risk of the browser deleting it to free up space.

Thank you for giving me the solution to this problem!

I always wanted devdocs to work (long train journeys especially would suddenly be more fun) but after this happened a couple of times and I couldn't figure it out or stop it I gave up.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#64

Post by ano88888 »

Hi, I feel you. I live in a south east asia country. we had very limited interent a decade ago and it was barely usable. Because I came back from America, it took me a long time to get used limited interent. What I did back then was to download as many useful resources as possible when i had good interent at office and used it offline when i was on slow mobile or home interent. stackoverflow, lauange documentation, libraries , wikipedia etc. Hope it gets better for you at Sudan. best of luck. You can also download useful learning videos for offline viewing too.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#68

Post by tamiral »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #59
mattpallissard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. I travel a lot and read a lot of ebooks. I also get a fair amount of work done without internet connectivity. * plan out exactly what you'll be working on, to the minutia * save source and upstream dependencies locally * have a local environment where you can build and run the code locally * download specific sites and documentation with `wget -r` and the like * have multiple things stacked up for…

Fun true story. I had a professor in university who only had 1 finger on 1 hand. He would plan out whole programs in his head, debug them mentally (step the code afaik), and then when he knew exactly what he wanted to write, he'd sit down and pluck away at his keyboard, one effortful keypress at a time. He was productive and smart enough to do it, and I think it's a great exercise for engineers to at least try a few…

something similar to my process when I was in university doing my internship and was doing half requirements gathering as a business analyst and half developer working on different small projects. It's really helpful to organize yourself , visualize the code, the problems, plan it out on paper and then code... less coding more design upfront.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#69

Post by nologic01 »

I'll go against the majority advice here. Don't start downloading large collections of digital stuff, whether pdf's, videos, wikipedia or whatever. For one thing there might be electricity outages too. And you can never really be "complete" and self-sufficient with educational resources unless you have a very clear idea what you will focus on.

Make the best of a bad situation by going deep into only one important and difficult and relevant for your future career subject. Pick one good and complete resource. E.g. a well regarded book with plenty of coding exercises, or a well documented open source project, complete with documentation etc. Then go over it line-by-line, understand and replicate everything, make it your own.

This approach will minimize that you will need random other resources. Hopefully at the other end of it you'll have a new and powerful tool in your toolkit. What is the best project to focus-on? you know better. Something orthogonal to android app development would be one direction. Maybe learn python and a backend framework like django that has excellent documentation. But taking android to the next level makes sense too. You know where you want to be.

Lets hope that at some point we'll learn how to live in peace and stop wasting human life and talent.

Re: Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

#70

Post by qup »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #59
mattpallissard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. I travel a lot and read a lot of ebooks. I also get a fair amount of work done without internet connectivity. * plan out exactly what you'll be working on, to the minutia * save source and upstream dependencies locally * have a local environment where you can build and run the code locally * download specific sites and documentation with `wget -r` and the like * have multiple things stacked up for…

Fun true story. I had a professor in university who only had 1 finger on 1 hand. He would plan out whole programs in his head, debug them mentally (step the code afaik), and then when he knew exactly what he wanted to write, he'd sit down and pluck away at his keyboard, one effortful keypress at a time. He was productive and smart enough to do it, and I think it's a great exercise for engineers to at least try a few…

I hope he's having a heyday with chatGPT translating his voice into code.
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