Ask HN: I won't have Internet access for months, How could I use my time?

[awabrh]

Am a software developer located in Khartoum, Sudan. The country is going through a turmoil.

Long story short Internet access is becoming more and more unstable, probably will go completely out within the next week.

I want to know what can I do to utilize my free time to be a better developer, but almost every development environment/learning resources requires internet access.

- I have 1 YOE as an Android Developer

- I am self-taught

[maerF0x0]

Old guy here, About 1/3 of my computing time was pre internet. Before that we did a lot of trial and error, reading electronic documentation (READMEs etc) and also books.

Depending on your current skill level perhaps the following would help.

I would recommend getting a book on each of your interest areas of the stack and work through them ~2 hours per day per book.

eg: a curriculum could be:

- A book on linux, android, or iOS operating systems. Learn about filesystems, reading binary files, and at least one binary file layout to get a sense of "it's all just data" (Hexdump or C)

- A book on networking (learn all the OSI layers, practice working with the various envelopes, see them in TCPdump / Wireshark or other sniffing tools

- A book on internet like technologies eg: https://hpbn.co/

- A book on Frontend development. perhaps React

- A book on Backend development. Perhaps something about making HTTP + RESTful + JSON apis (alternative GRPC development)

- A book on a datastore of choice, I recommend postgres and you can grab the manual and books from here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/

just my 2c of how I'd spend ~1 month per book offline but still progressing.

The hardest part is going to be the discipline to actually work at it every day consistently and for more than like 15 mins :)

[mattpallissard]

I agree with this. I travel a lot and read a lot of ebooks. I also get a fair amount of work done without internet connectivity.

  * plan out exactly what you'll be working on, to the minutia
  * save source and upstream dependencies locally
  * have a local environment where you can build and run the code locally
  * download specific sites and documentation with `wget -r` and the like
  * have multiple things stacked up for if you hit a blocker on one project.

If it's a solo big project you can work without internet in perpetuity. You just have to RYO on any libraries you don't have downloaded before hand.

[onos]

Pretty interesting to think about how the internet has changed engineering. Eg if most things were learned by book in the past, I’d guess that would result in more coalescence around the standard libraries — need enough readership to make it worth writing a book on it, and it’s also easiest to find the books that are most widely available. Now that we have internet and can easily find stack overflow pages, it probably leads to package proliferation, and less solid knowledge of the standard libraries.

[Someone1234]

You can download all of Wikipedia (20 GB for English):

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

You can also download Android documentation:

https://androidsdkoffline.blogspot.com/p/android-offline-doc...

You can KINDA download MDN (very YMMV and $$$):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus/docs/features/offli...

[mtmail]

https://devdocs.io/offline can also download 600 documentation sets into the browser. I don't know how reliable it is over several months "Note: your browser may delete DevDocs's offline data if your computer is running low on disk space and you haven't used the app in a while."

[sdht0]

Kiwix is a much nicer way to have Wikipedia, Stackexchange, Arch Wiki, and others offline.

Reader: https://www.kiwix.org/en/download/

Content: https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng

[banana_giraffe]

Along the same lines, you can download a dump of the different Stack Exchange sites:

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

The dump of Stack Overflow's Posts is about 20gb. The Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange site is about 100mb.

[hutzlibu]

"You can KINDA download MDN"

Or you just download them zipped here:

https://kapeli.com/mdn_offline

In general, you can use a crawler and download (allmost) any website you like. Works better with static sites of course, but learning ressources usually are.

[pluijzer]

Another thing you can checkout is for example HTTrack, you can use it to make a local clone of a website. I have used it when moving to a remote location where I wouldn't have Internet for a long time.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Get ebook dumps while you can. Some of those are Russian, but most are not.

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5705905

The first post includes an index that leads to a dozen more dumps, grouped by programming language and/or field. Look for links named "Скачать".

If you manage to see this comment before moderators remove it, good for you. If not, at least I tried — there's no contact info in your profile to contact you privately. (Sorry dang. I've been through similar shit and the last thing you care about in that situation are "intellectual property rights" of some Mr. Moneybags from the opposite side of the globe).

[jll29]

You could apply for funding from a charity to get a copy of the Internet Archive. The IA is making incomplete copies including search function available in form of a container containing several 19" racks called the Petabox: https://archive.org/web/petabox.php

This is still useful after the conflict is over, as rebuilding infrastructure can take decades, and the container could be beneficial if hosted e.g. by a school.

You could create a mesh network that links local organisations to the Petabox without being initially connected to "the" Internet.

In any case, I wish you personally well and peace to your country!

[Kaotique]

Do you understand that OP lives in the city where the fighting is taking place? This advice is very unrealistic on several levels.

Other people right pointed out to download some e-books.

[amtamt]

So if one can't find bread, one should go for cake.

[johnea]

I know this is extreme, but maybe you should consider reality?

[anyfactor]

I spent about a month without internet. I will be honest the last thing I touched was the learning resources. I downloaded youtube videos using ytdl and kept watching them on repeat. I would see a tv series every now and then, but nothing beat YouTube videos. You can request your entire liked videos information from Google. Moreover, it is very difficult learn programming without actually doing it and you can't realistically do programming without Google these days.

I don't think not having internet doesn’t suddenly make you 10x productive or 10x focused. You are the same person with and without internet. Just admit that upfront.

So, prep for it and try to replicate what your habits are with having internet.

You can download a few learning resources but please don't go overboard. Focus on one thing you want to finish completely. Don't go on a downloading spree.

[hutzlibu]

"Don't go on a downloading spree."

Why not? Where is the harm?

It is better to have a book you don't need, than to not have books you discover you do need and memory is cheap.

I spend lots of time off grid and I surely did not touch every ebook I had in my collection, but it was still nice browsing through what I had and then choosing the one I wanted that moment.

[soperj]

> you can't realistically do programming without Google these days.

This is really not true. Try it. It's not that hard, and will likely make you a better programmer.

[kwhitefoot]

Use some of the time to take a break from internet style interactions, read a few classic books.

But before you go just download a couple of IDEs and all the documentation for them and the language you want to use and install all the libraries you might think of using. Then turn off the net and see how it goes.

Or just download Emacs and a bunch of elisp resources. The create some applications and tools in Emacs. It is pretty self contained.

We used to write huge applications without any network access of any kind.

[louwhopley]

Not sure if practical or affordable, but could consider getting your hands on a Starlink, then selling wifi access to people around you to help cover the cost of the Starlink subscription. Seems like there's coverage in Khartoum.

Good luck out there!

https://ts2.space/en/starlink-in-khartoum-khartoum/

[ultra_nick]

Download ebooks and documentation. Use Calibre to organize them.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

https://www.gutenberg.org/

Computing systems would be a good subject to study. I'd also recommend downloading Ubuntu to a self booting flash drive. Linux has a lot of useful developer tools for someone without internet.

https://beej.us/guide/

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#1...

[ghostpepper]

I know this is a hard situation and I don't want to make light of it, but maybe for inspiration you can look at what some other programmers were able to accomplish by deliberately going offline for some days/weeks. I was reminded of this post by John Carmack about why he chose BSD for his offline programming week, instead of Linux.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2110408722...

[nologic01]

I'll go against the majority advice here. Don't start downloading large collections of digital stuff, whether pdf's, videos, wikipedia or whatever. For one thing there might be electricity outages too. And you can never really be "complete" and self-sufficient with educational resources unless you have a very clear idea what you will focus on.

Make the best of a bad situation by going deep into only one important and difficult and relevant for your future career subject. Pick one good and complete resource. E.g. a well regarded book with plenty of coding exercises, or a well documented open source project, complete with documentation etc. Then go over it line-by-line, understand and replicate everything, make it your own.

This approach will minimize that you will need random other resources. Hopefully at the other end of it you'll have a new and powerful tool in your toolkit. What is the best project to focus-on? you know better. Something orthogonal to android app development would be one direction. Maybe learn python and a backend framework like django that has excellent documentation. But taking android to the next level makes sense too. You know where you want to be.

Lets hope that at some point we'll learn how to live in peace and stop wasting human life and talent.

[atomicnature]

I'd practice math problems, in the areas of linear algebra, vector spaces, and so on. The experience will help me assimilate AI/ML better once I get Internet back.

Also, for variety, I may discipline my thought process further by learning mathematical proof techniques. The extra discipline will help me acquire knowledge of deeper subjects, with less effort.

[TJSomething]

Given your skill level, I would recommend working through the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in Racket, which has a nice self-contained development environment.

[balaji1]

If you have free time, you could try to build an (offline) app that you or someone near you might need. It is good fun to find a user and build features for them.

Other comments have great pointers for downloading docs/books/resources offline. Also textbooks are underrated.

[ZunarJ5]

https://internet-in-a-box.org/ Bringing a few of these would help the local community!

[davidw]

I mean... is getting out something you're looking at? Seems like it might not be a bad move? Perhaps people here could help you out with that if you're lucky.

[puntofisso]

It's hard to really understand what it must be to live through such a tragedy, so I'm not sure how relevant my suggestions will be.

But I would do three things (some of which I see mentioned in several post below):

1. download as much as you can – wikipedia, stackexchange (e.g. https://archive.org/download/stackexchange), openstreetmap; possibly, set up a local wifi router to allow others to access these and, if you keep it technical, it might be that this will enable you to get in touch with others with similar needs, which should keep you learning together as much as possible

2. if the conditions allow, try and get your hands on StarLink. Getting a dish and router might be problematic. But if you like diy and assuming you can actually sign up to it, it should be possible to self-build a connection kit using spare parts and an ordinary sat dish.

...which brings me to...

3. consider getting into ham radio. This, once again, depends on the situation in the country, and whether licensing is an option or not. But, providing you can and that you have electricity, this could get you in touch with others, who will usually be techies and may be able to also answer coding questions (although this is a willingly long stretch). And, albeit at very low speed, Internet via ham radio is itself a possibility, e.g. https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-a-longdistance-data-network-...

All the best to you, and I hope the situation improves quickly!

[qbasic_forever]

Setup a caching repository proxy like nexus: https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-public

This is a little server you run locally and point your package managers like Gradle, pip, npm, etc. at it and it will grab dependencies from their upstream and cache them locally to be available offline later. Once you get it setup go wild adding every dependency you can think of using so it preloads the cache with good stuff. Unfortunately offline caching for package managers is really hit or miss and rarely a priority to support, so expect some pain getting it all setup. Good luck.

Also if you haven't already consider installing and learning languages with a good standard library so you can install them once and do a lot of stuff. Python, go, and deno are really good options with capable standard libraries out of the box. Avoid nodejs or similar minimal/no standard library languages. Rust is surprisingly bad/hard to use offline in my experience too (cargo constantly wants to hit the internet and needs a lot of handholding to play nicely).

[serf]

I'd pick up e-book copies of the computer books that are famous for having lots of follow-along problems to solve.

SICP exercises, "learn to code" books are generally structured that way. 'How to build X' books are similar.

Not a suggestion necessarily, but 'Land of Lisp' is mostly taught through author-guided tutorials and how-tos for small projects. I imagine that format would be useful in a disconnected area.

[awabrh]

I remember working through Brian Harvey's SICP lecture notes and HWs a couple of years ago. Each Homework had one harder exercise labeled "Extra for Experts" which I later found out was standard in a lot of UC Berkeley courses.

The recursion HW was really fun so I took it upon my self to never look up the answer to the Extra exercise no matter how long it took me to solve it. The problem was to re-implement the recursive function of the last exercise using only lambda functions. I wrestled with it for hours, then gave up, then got back to it days later before I finally cracked it.

Later that day I googled the question to see better/ more elegant solutions and found out about this thing called Y combinator, I googled it to know more but everywhere I look I see this company called Ycombinator. Down the rabbit hole I went and 27 PG essays, 230 HN hrs and 2 years later, here am I

Good times :)

[PurpleRamen]

You can download documentations (directly, or through apps like zeal or dash), e-books for your preferred topics, make local copies of videos (with yt-dlp) and from open source-projects. Just studying source code and documentation, and making some small projects of your own should help you by leap and bounds.

[pm3003]

Also very importantly, you can download parts of Stackexchange (askubuntu, stackoverflow and others) in Kiwix format (same as Wikipedia). You can download courses from Khan Academy this way. https://www.kiwix.org/en/

I used to spend several months with very little Internet access (every other week on my cell phone). I made a small server with Jellyfin, tons of podcasts with airsonic, several youtube channels, a big Kiwix library (Wikipedia and Wiktionary - several languages), an ebook library (I haven't found the right way to do it, Calibre-server is a little complicated). https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

And also a dozen of physical books, typically in a language I'm learning.