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This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm."

Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient since there's no time lost in collateral browsing. (This is what I do on planes, trains, or when I've got Freedom.app turned on.)

I used to regularly go offline for 2-4 weeks at a time. I'd just go on vacation without a laptop or cell phone. One of the big lessons of being unplugged is just how wrong you are about needing to be all the time. Even as a founder I've managed to get away with going camping for a week by setting up everything so that emergency stuff goes out via SMS notification and throwing a netbook in my backpack (which effectively puts me in "push" mode for going online, which I've never needed or done on said trips).

Pull the plug completely. It'll be a much more instructive experience.




Working in PHP I find I could probably easily download the PHP docs and be nearly completely happy. Client side though is a different story, plenty of times I have look for something in the JQuery docs but needed to refer to something like a stack overflow question to really get what I need.

JQuery/ JS seem to lend themselves to many different ways to do tasks and the selectors are a bit like regex for me in that I haven't really committed it all to memory.

It is a trade off though with the distractions, possibly you could try and bank up stuff that docs don't give you the answer to and hit them all up in one go.


Pretty much the full web dev stack is open source, including jQuery. If you really get stuck, you'll actually learn more by reading the source code than by getting a piecemeal info on Stackoverflow. I don't remember having to do that with jQuery (most of the JS I write is without a JS library, and I have the rhino book), but I've frequently read the source code to bits of Rails or MRI when I've not understood something and been offline.


Yeah you definitely can glean a fair bit from the source, something like selectors is fairly verbose though as it is a parser so often it's far quicker just to Google up the specific thing you need. You can also get a deeper understanding from the source so it does probably balance out.


Agreed. HN is truly addictive! I keep refreshing front page at least 10 times in 30mins... others might be doing it higher.


I know right? It sounded like "I'm staying offline except for this, this, this, this, and this..." instead of "I'm going offline".

Not that I mean to be too critical or anything, but all the exceptions were a little disappointing for some reason.


In 2003, I only had spotty and slow internet, so I downloaded the whole php docs as a single file. This was great, the only problem was that the file was so huge it took over a minute to fully load...




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