Ask HN: How do I code offline for a week?
I'm going to be going to the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks, and there's going to be no internet there.
I design with Figma and I code in React Native/ReactJS. How can I build something or learn a skill with no internet to make sure I'm productive over this time?
88 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadNot meant to be snarky, sorry I just don't have any idea how you'd get local setups and then have the relevant developer docs in an accessible manner. Maybe a locally running Llama model?
Doesn’t need to be PICO-8 but there’s plenty of languages that can be done entirely offline.
Still keeps your brain active and lets you learn something new that might help you in parallel ways.
If none of that applies, and you still want to learn something to do with tech? Well, you know this won't be an ideal situation to engage directly with a system. How about zooming out a bit? Read some books. Some of Stallman's essays. Clifford Stoll. Or anything else more recent that you think is big-picture significant to your field. Your situation will be ideal for contemplation, which will in the long-term make you a better contributor to whatever projects you take on.
Internet is the same. You ask and someone made the effort to voice their opinion on something and you have to put the effort into figuring out if they would fit your situation. If not, continue on.
Nope, you just sound like an asshole.
The only time I would be very annoyed by such responses is if that's all the responses I got. Some of both is reasonable: perhaps I did pose an XY problem.
If the community cared, wouldn’t they answer the question instead of ignoring the question that was asked?
_Given_ that I want to study React in the woods, how should I do it?
Whether or not to study React in the woods is completely irrelevant.
Ad hominems are against TOS.
Answering the question is irrelevant if it’s the wrong question to begin with. And for the wrong circumstances (ie if this is a family vacation) can be counter-productive. It’s far more productive to zoom out, ask why the author is asking for advice to study react on vacation, and address that instead. Consider this as you advance your career past recent college grad / swe1 :)
I've no idea what you meant by your reference to college grad / swe1 but it certainly didn't lessen the above-described impression.
I also think that answers like this are one of many. Let people put in their 2 cents. I think it's great to have a variety of answers that approach the question differently.
And here, “do something else” seems a popular answer too. Perhaps it’s how we approach problem solving in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
The person asking the question is asking how to do something, instead of explaining what the problem is.
Without an explanation of what the problem actually is, you have to guess.
Solving XY problems without getting at the root issue can create endless amounts of needless effort for many people, which is why discussion and communication are so important.
This basically meant loading up a thumb drive of all the possible documentation he could get. You can use site archive tools to download an entire website's documentation. Depending on the complexity of what you want to build - you would also probably need to mirror a subset of your package manager i.e. npm mirror. Probably lots of eBooks, courses, tutorials. Nowadays maybe even a LLM might be a useful reference.
that would be very hard for me though, coding without internet. he must be really good at his craft haha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
localhost... right?
If you just want to be productive, you could also bring a lot of books or downloaded tutorials on a drive.
Btw, make sure your drive is encrypted and you think of a way to backup your data so you don’t lose the offline progress.
Is the purpose of the retreat to the middle of nowhere to be productive ?
Why do you think you need to make sure you're productive ?
If the purpose of your retreat is to be productive, maybe chose something that you can do without Internet, like programming in a language/framework you feel comfortable with, and just bring their documentation with you ?
Even though it's not as good as GPT-4, and might even be slower, the value you might get from a local modal in such a case will probably beat most other things. It will allow you to both look stuff up, and even learn new things without needing to copy large parts of potentially irrelevant information beforehand.
- The replacement for Figma is straightforward - pen and paper. Make sure you take some.
- devdocs.io for offline docs or if what you're using isn't in there, a lot of packages offer a PDF of their docs.
- I keep a pyproject file that has basically any mainstream package I am likely to want at any point while writing Python, then when I leave for a trip I make sure everything is installed locally. Docker can also be helpful for this.
- Sometimes I write tests when I have internet then when I'm offline I just spend the time making the tests go green.
- Other times I will forget about writing new code and learn something new by working through the PDF of a book. Most technical books set up the dev environment in the first few pages, do that when you have internet then you're good to go.
Other people have raised good points about getting away from your computer. I don't want to preach but I do like a 'holiday' day where I do some light coding in the morning then spend the afternoon doing something else entirely.
If that advice falls on deaf ears, and you really do want to write code on your time off, then here are some suggestions. I was about to say 'welcome to how we used to code'... but there are differences, both positive and negative.
* Tools like `git` are invaluable to the extent they let you manage source code control offline. Use them if you don't already.
* Settle on your dependencies and frameworks while you have network access. Download all the source you can for future reading.
* Focus on algorithmic work.... places where it's more about thinking through the code you're writing rather than interfacing with something else. (Hard these days.)
* Buy and bring some books. There are still good programming books that can be useful. You won't be totally at the cutting edge with these, but you probably don't need to be either.
More to the point though, op says “productive” and there’s more ways to be productive than doing grunt work. Bring books about things you want to learn or improve in your life, not necessarily code. See for example any of the books published by Stripe Press (https://press.stripe.com).
unplug instead and consider it as a break.
youll just get disappointed once you encounter edge cases where you need more than the official documentation. i mean things that are hidden in github issues and stackoverflow posts.
it's okay to take a break anon, everythings gonna be okay.
Is there no way to go online for all duration of the trip?
Or is there some device that you can use occasionally to browse or perhaps even download something to an usb drive?
Then see what problems arises next and solve that as best you can.
And so on.
Which means it will probably be a bit frustrating, involve a lot of small failures, and maybe even large failures.
But you will learn if you like to code without the internet and will try it again with better preparation or just liked the idea of being a person who codes without the internet but are not (which is ok).
Some people like to camp and some don’t.
Good luck.
I did an hour of coding today disconnected from the internet and it was nice. Some things have to be put off but there is a surprising amount you can do!
https://zealdocs.org/
I would recommend using ollama (or install llamacpp if you're on Windows) to bring along a modestly capable LLM you can run locally such a CodeLlama or Minstrel. They won't be as capable as ChatGPT, but a lot of knowledge gets compressed into these relatively small models.