This is probably too extreme of a life change for most people to implement, but there are ways to gain some of the benefits without an entire lifestyle upheaval.
Recently I've begun camping on business trips instead of using my hotel budget. I'll fly in with a tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and cooler bag, rent a car, and set up camp in whichever campground is closest to the city. Most of these places are meant for local families, and are equipped with water, power (for trailers), and showers.
In the morning I drive into the city for business, then head back out to the campsite to hike, sit and think, and code. I haven't taken a smartphone with me, so those after-city hours are devoid of the usual notification hail.
It's done wonders for my focus, motivation, and sense of purpose. Waking up to sunlight, birds chirping, and the scent of pine is an invigorating start to a day, and those twilight hours are great for going over designs and pre-planning coding time.
A lot of that low-level building buzz of dissatisfaction vanishes after a few days of this. I think we need nature. We need freshness and quiet and the white noise of wind, birds, and streams.
I would love a community/place where this was always possible, but for now, travel-business-camping has worked wonders. (And the look on my colleague's faces when I tell them about my "hotel"... priceless.)
> In the morning I drive into the city for business, then head back out to the campsite to hike, sit and think, and code. I haven't taken a smartphone with me, so those after-city hours are devoid of the usual notification hail.
You must be a great programmer because there is no way I could program without Stack Overflow/Google.
Yeah, I said the same thing before I started this. But that's when I'm waste deep in code and I hit the inevitable stumbling block of a weird library bug, missing config option, strange behavior, etc.
That addictive, power-through flow state is hard to maintain without instant SO/Google access, and for many years that was the only way I coded. But I've begun to relish the other mode of programming: the deep thought and careful mental construction of the optimal program, piece by piece, module by module. Sure, I can't bang out as many lines at night, but when I go into the city in the morning I have a mental view of underlying structure – laid out in clear, bold strokes – that makes my SO-enabled coding so much more effective, and directed.*
(*I've noticed that letting SO answer a question prevents any pause which would make you step back from your work and ask "Am I even taking the right approach here?" Low latency, REPLs, and quick access answers make it very easy to go down a rabbit hole – the dark side of exploratory coding.)
And yes, as others have mentioned, I do cache and wget all the docs for whatever tools I'm currently using. With all that, it's hard to get truly stuck, even without the internet.
I'm the same, but I recently discovered that a dump of all Stack Overflow content is available for download. There's a few apps around to easily use it offline. Combine that with the "Dash" app for mac (which downloads other official docs) and it should be pretty easy to work off the grid.
* Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 150+ APIs (for a full list, see below). You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.
There's also a complexity explosion to factor in, and saying that there was a time before Google and Stack Overflow seems a bit dismissive of that. Chances are, your app today is built on at least a dozen dependencies that require documentation and reference lookup several times throughout any given day.
Point taken, but reference material can cover a lot more than API docs. Changes in dependencies, dependencies of dependencies, and their change in source over time are often critical pieces of information. Further, it's difficult to cover all possible material for dependencies that have been taken for granted; OS, HTTP server, drivers, and unexpected complications like OEM-level defects in specific revisions of hardware models are difficult to account for.
>whichever campground is closest to the city
>and are equipped with water, power (for trailers), and showers.
This is not camping. It's dishonest and offensive to call sitting around with every amenity programming camping. I can't understand where you get off having the audacity to say people need nature when you're flying around and driving hours to spend time in tacky family camp grounds and playing on your computer. I'm so disgusted that you think not taking a smartphone with you is an act of daring revolution. So, what, you own two phones? And the smart one can't be made to stop vibrating over every reply to your dumb tweets? Regarding everything else you wrote, there's a book about how to buck gullibility that might suit your little maverick wilderness adventures.
So are you implying he should not do these things? Or simply he is not doing it the right way? Or is your harsh tone due to perceiving this small change as inadequate for an outdoors guru like yourself? Please enlighten us as to why his small change (which makes him happy) is not appropriate to you.
Recently I've begun camping on business trips instead of using my hotel budget. I'll fly in with a tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and cooler bag, rent a car, and set up camp in whichever campground is closest to the city. Most of these places are meant for local families, and are equipped with water, power (for trailers), and showers.
In the morning I drive into the city for business, then head back out to the campsite to hike, sit and think, and code. I haven't taken a smartphone with me, so those after-city hours are devoid of the usual notification hail.
It's done wonders for my focus, motivation, and sense of purpose. Waking up to sunlight, birds chirping, and the scent of pine is an invigorating start to a day, and those twilight hours are great for going over designs and pre-planning coding time.
A lot of that low-level building buzz of dissatisfaction vanishes after a few days of this. I think we need nature. We need freshness and quiet and the white noise of wind, birds, and streams.
I would love a community/place where this was always possible, but for now, travel-business-camping has worked wonders. (And the look on my colleague's faces when I tell them about my "hotel"... priceless.)