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

5 points by jbranchaud 12y ago ↗ HN

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.

10 comments

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PencilAndPaper 12y ago ↗

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

devonbarrett 12y ago ↗

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

gus_massa 12y ago ↗

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

malandrew 12y ago ↗

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

AznHisoka 12y ago ↗

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

jbranchaud 12y ago ↗

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

shubhamjain 12y ago ↗

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

LarryMade2 12y ago ↗

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.

jbranchaud 12y ago ↗

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?

alirov 12y ago ↗

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.