Ask HN: Coding outdoors

I would think a tablet along with a wireless keyboard would be the best option if you are looking for something small. A tablet with a data-connection even better. The biggest problem would be a good enough screen to use in the sunlight.

I'm sitting in my garden doing work on a MBP right now. Only 'downside' is I have to sit in the shade. Glare/flare makes it unworkable otherwise. Otoh, sitting in the sun for prolonged periods doesn't sound too good either. I'm perfectly happy with strolling around in the sun while mulling over some problems, then returning back to my laptop.

You need to find a screen what works in a sunny environment. Even if you sit in a shade the ambient lighting is too much for most laptops. Glossy screens are horrible, matte ones slightly more readable but not nearly enough for my eyes.

This started into a realm I had some knowledge and ended into a realm with zero knowledge from my part.

I can't help with cracking the reader. Keep in mind, while it has a benefit of not reflecting sun light with a glare, it still is not 100% immune to it.

You can always try making some shade where you work. Bring some headphones and music, as some environments can be distracting and noisy.

Laptop with reasonably bright screen and good battery life gets you pretty far. Currenly I'm sitting in the shade outside my workplace with Lenovo X230. Its 26 degrees celsius in the shade, which is cooler than the 30 inside my office (3rd floor, no air conditioning, even ventilation is shut off for repairs).

The screen is an issue though, I'd much rather have the Lenovo W530 I had in my previous job. It was really nice when working without external displays and had very nice battery life to boot.

I am currently travelling around Asia and often work outdoors. I think it's already quite easy to do, though I am not sure whether you mean working 'outside' or in 'the outdoors'. Mark that up to English being far from my native language.

Requirements for me: - shade: the sun is too harsh to be exposed to it for any considerable period of time and causes plenty of screen glare. - decent hardware: I'm using a standard laptop. XPS 13 in my case. Too small kills productivity but YMMV. - internet connection: easily found in hotels and restaurants. data card if further away or with bad signals. local if no connection is available. - reasonably quiet: I don't like headphones, but if the environment is too noisy it makes longer stretches hard/impossible.

The Pi / kindle solution looks fun, but I agree - I wish there was a simple external screen solution perhaps

If you're working on your own projects or freelance, all you need is a bit of shade. Depending where you are then using mosquito coils, once the sun goes down, is a good idea.

I was in Ubud, Bali earlier last for a few months and worked in my garden under an awning. ( photo here: http://goo.gl/p1HdNG ). The garden had a power socket. Nicest working location I've had! On the downside wifi could be a bit spotty and there were occasional power outages.

At least in Thailand, most beach bars have both wifi and power outlets these days. Even on small islands, they have surprisingly good satellite Internet.

Even on a Macbook Air, the screen is bright enough for me to code during the day (in the shade). As a bonus, you have an unlimited supply of alpha testers for whatever you create!

A couple of years back I bought a MacBook Pro with the antiglare display for this very reason. It was great to be able to work in the garden, in theory, but then you realise MBPs have/had awful battery life, especially in the sun, and when they get hot they're literally painful to work on. Oops.

Would love a simple, cheap, tiny Linux netbook with high quality keyboard & trackpad. Resigned myself to the fact that I'll always need a Mac for design (Sketch etc), but I oculd happily hack on code in Arch.

I've had a lot of success with my MBP and a cellular modem.

Try it and see - experiment with different setups, equipment, locales and work out what suits you best

Is the screen in google glass big enough or bright enough to work on? Ideally, it would be nice not to have to lug around the laptop and burn your thighs. Just have a bluetooth keyboard/mouse connected to a head mounted screen system.

I've tried this a couple of times. IMO screen technology in sunlight is the limiting factor - no-one's made a laptop screen good enough to make this work without you straining your eyes. Shame, because I write this from my office and I can see that it's a gloriously sunny day outside!

I do like printing code out and editing it from the hammock. You can't do it all day, and it doesn't seem very fast, but it sure is nice to plan all the edits on paper (4 color pens = colordiff!) and then type it up, test it, commit it. My hammock is about 30 paces from my laser printer, so if I wanted to go much further than that I'd need a portable printer.

Maybe a tablet/laptop with a Pixel Qi-screen?

"The advantage of Pixel Qi displays over conventional LCDs is mainly that they can be set to operate under transflective mode and reflective mode, improving eye-comfort, power usage, and visibility under bright ambient light." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi

http://www.pixelqi.com/devices

If your connection isn't extremely stable, Mosh is a very good solution: http://mosh.mit.edu/

The kindleberry pi has all the elements I think are essential:

- low power - out door readable - light weight

The problem is that it isn't in one, handy package.

Laptops are limited by displays, it sounds like transflective-LCD is ideal. Panasonic Toughbooks have them, so could be a good bet.

I'd like to build an enclosure for a Pi and a PixelQi setup (they made the screens for OLPC). https://www.adafruit.com/products/1303

I assume there just isn't a market large enough to force these into existence?

I sometimes work in the garden. On cloudy days my Thinkpad display works just fine. If it's really sunny I use a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet pc I bought used on ebay, along with an external keyboard. The Stylistic tablets have (at least used to have) models with transflective displays (the ones with frontlights instead of backlights). Those are awesome in daylight, but look dull indoors. The resolution normally is not that great, but for ssh it should be just fine. Still kind of unwieldy, though :/

Hah, I just remembered that my alternative would have been a netbook modded with a Pixel Qi display from Maker Shed. Maker Shed does not seem to have them anymore, but perhaps you can find one of the prebuilt devices with pixel qi displays: http://www.pixelqi.com/devices

edit: I cannot recommend working in nature enough! I'm usually both super productive and in great mood while working outdoors.

Although I don't work outside, I try and go for a walk outside most days at lunch time. It gets the legs moving and the detachment helps me think.

When I code outside it's on my Air, on my local copy of some project/repo. Get a good bag so you can take your kit anywhere. I love my Freitag for this purpose.

Currently I live at rented room on roof top of a residential building. Temperature of my city(Bangalore) is around 22 degree centigrade(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangalore#Climate), mostly cloudy. I have setup a table with four chair outside on the roof. I find it pleasant to work outside mostly during morning and evening. In day time if its cloudy and little wind, I feel better working outside.

I use macbook and sublime to do my work, light reflection sometimes blurs the text, but it is mostly tricky, I try different position and get it working. It's little difficult to work outside during sunny days.

At times I love the reflection of sky on my screen http://imgur.com/a/ZhOv2

If someone made a display, or some sort of filter for my macbook so I could see the screen properly outside, I'd be out there all the time!

Most people here have mentioned how a reflective or transflective display helps a lot. These used to be much more plentiful, they were standard on PDAs for example. Kind of rare and expensive now.

One thing that no one has touched on. It is much easier to work if you use an inverted color scheme for your terminals. Black text on a white background works better when front-lighting LCD technology.