21–30 of 34 posts
I should try that, but finding good coffee shop in my area is hard.
Business opportunity?
I should try that, but finding good coffee shop in my area is hard.
Business opportunity?
Coffeshops are not good for this, but I have found libraries often are. Quiet environments, often excellent views (most libraries seem to be in the best parts of town) and some even have areas you can lie down (meant more for people to read than nap, but many people do it) or big grassy areas surrounding them.
Although I'd love to agree, I think there are two major reasons why I cannot program in a coffee shop. 1. No ergonomic keyboard (or my 22 in. monitor) to help prevent carpel tunnel. 2. No Aeron Chair.
I sort of have this problem. I use a model M keyboard at home, and my laptop keyboard just doesn't compare. So I find it hard to type.
But it really doesn't matter, since there isn't all that much typing involved when programming; only when writing replies to Hacker News comments ;)
A word of warning from a Seattle guy who does this all the time: if you start going to coffeehouses to work, please take the environment of the place into account. Nothing is more grating than when a previously social, comfortable place is turned into a caffeinated study hall by geeks with laptops. Likewise, it's awful when a quiet, subdued place is over-run with noisy group meetings. Usually, the owner of an establi…
I should try that, but finding good coffee shop in my area is hard.
Business opportunity?
"The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of "cozy") are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job."
The first startup where I worked, it was just me and the founder, and we were always working from a Starbucks with two laptops as a way to save money on the office and also to allow for change of scenery (this was Manhattan, and there were something like 60 Starbucks here at the time) It worked great for 3 months. After Thanksgiving all the stores started to play the same Christmas Tunes CD on repeat - nothing kills…
the most disturbing thing on starbuck's playlist last year was the Carol King live album. I wanted to kill myself when they started playing it every hour. The alternatives, if you still have Tmobile wireless, are - Fedex Kinko's, harsh lighting coupled with excessive air conditioning, and who knows what kind of fumes you're inhaling? - Borders bookstores are more like it, if you need ot look up K&R, gang of 4, whatev…
That's when you chip in with your friends/coworkers, get one wireless account (assuming you all go to the same store on a reasonably fixed schedule), and bring in some dd-wrt/openwrt/tomato routers (with all but one of them in bridge-mode), and have the master router set up with WPA2 on your side and either OpenVPN at the router level, or just use whatever external SSH boxes you've got as SOCKS proxies. (If you care, remember that Firefox doesn't proxy DNS requests over SOCKS unless you set the about:config item network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true).
Also don't forget to bring power strips, since you're bringing in more hardware.
Although I'd love to agree, I think there are two major reasons why I cannot program in a coffee shop. 1. No ergonomic keyboard (or my 22 in. monitor) to help prevent carpel tunnel. 2. No Aeron Chair.
i just spent half the day in a coffee shop. the table was too low, so i over-stressed my back leaning in to see the screen properly. (i'm a bit near-sighted.)
When I'm coding on my laptop I'm probably at 50% efficiency compared to my desktop. I've got a giant Kinesis keyboard (great tool, but expensive), a big mouse pad, a 24" monitor, a subwoofer, a second pc, a stack of books, etc. One cannot replicate such an environment in a coffe shop.
A coffee shop is probably great for relaxing, brainstorming, having an occasional change of scenery, and writing children's novels, but I can't imagine it's an efficient way to produce complex software. Most importantly, I would never be able to concentrate, feeling like I am imposing by sitting in the shop for hours. Obviously, others enjoy sitting in coffee shops, but how many of you are doing complex work while there? Or do you save the light work for coffee shop visits?
The first startup where I worked, it was just me and the founder, and we were always working from a Starbucks with two laptops as a way to save money on the office and also to allow for change of scenery (this was Manhattan, and there were something like 60 Starbucks here at the time) It worked great for 3 months. After Thanksgiving all the stores started to play the same Christmas Tunes CD on repeat - nothing kills…