When I was living in Paris I had a 20 min ride from home to work each day. I picked up the habit to read during those 40 total minutes and I was going through books like I had never been able to, because while 40 min is not a lot, it’s about 150h per year. One easily underestimates the power of consistency.
I program on the subway
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Re: I program on the subway
#12With coding agents AI almost never manually type code anymore. It would be great to have a code editor that runs on my phone so I can do voice prompts and let the coding agents type stuff for me.
That sounds awful
Similar to a product or engineering manager giving directions on a call from the golf course.
Re: I program on the subway
#13I work/program on CalTrain but that’s pretty common. NYC subway or BART seems a bit more challenging.
It’s overall time much better spent than being stuck in a car.
Re: I program on the subway
#14I used to do work on Caltrain, which used to be like 3 hours of my commute and didn't have any internet, so I would carefully plan what I could do beforehand. My code deploys to a machine that's very different from my laptop, but I had a Docker container set up to cross compile things and loaded up the docs beforehand, so as long as I planned out what I wanted to do.
These days Caltrain is faster and has occasionally frustrating, but fairly good Wi-Fi, so now my constraints are that I don't have a large monitor but not really much else.
Re: I program on the subway
#15> I don't even have an internet connection. Vibe coders feeling a great disturbance in the force.
Nomophobia is the word for that lol
Re: I program on the subway
#16With coding agents AI almost never manually type code anymore. It would be great to have a code editor that runs on my phone so I can do voice prompts and let the coding agents type stuff for me.
Claude does this, at least on an iPhone. They added Code to the app about a month ago. I used it to get a Pebble Watch project started.
Re: I program on the subway
#17Here is a description of the daily commute by Michael Milken, 1980s junk bond king, as told in "Predator's Ball" by Connie Bruck:
At 5:30am each weekday in the early 1970s, a bus pulled up to a stop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a young man lugging a bag that bulged with papers mounted its steps. He was making the two-hour commute to New York City, where he worked at the investment banking firm of Drexel Firestone. The train would have provided a more comfortable and faster ride; but, for those very reasons, it also offered more opportunity to meet other Wall Street acquaintances. They would want to engage in the kind of idle small talk that commuters share to pass the time. The thought must have been intolerable. He did not wish to be rude, but he wanted no interruption.
As soon as he had settled into his seat, being sure to take one with an empty one adjacent, he unloaded a mountain of prospectuses and 10ks (annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings) onto the seat next to him. On winter mornings the sky was still pitch black and the light on the bus was too dim for him to be able to read. He wore a leather aviation cap with the earflaps down; he had been bald for years, and although he wore a toupee his head always felt cold on these frosty mornings. Now over his aviation cap he fitted a miner's headlamp -- strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead.
Re: I program on the subway
#18Re: I program on the subway
#19> I don't even have an internet connection. Vibe coders feeling a great disturbance in the force.
Not immediately of course, you have to wait until the robots are trained on this blogpost.
Re: I program on the subway
#20I've done it a few times on city busses which I'd say are worse than subway. Less legroom, bumpier ride, more people passing by. My 13" laptop barely fit.
It's not something I'd want to do on the daily but if you really need to get something done and are running out of time (those busses get stuck in traffic for half an hour or more), it's doable.