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comment by Michaël Trazzi (mtrazzi) · 2020-05-08T20:45:07.900Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've been experimenting with offline coding recently, sharing some of my conclusions.

Why I started 1) Most of the programming I do at the moment only needs a terminal and a text editor. I'm implementing things from scratch without needing libraries and I noticed I could just read the docs offline. 2) I came to the conclusion that googling things wasn't worth the cost of having a web browser open--using the outside view, when I look back at all the instances of coding while having the internet in easy-access, I always end up being distracted, and even if i code my mind thinks about what I could be doing.

How to go offline (Computer) 1) turn off wi-fi 2) forget network (Phone) if you're at home, put it out of reach. I turn it off then throw it on top of a closet, so far that i need to grab a chair in the living room to catch it. If you have an office, then do the same thing and go to your office without your phone.

When My general rule in January was that I could only check the internet between 11pm and 12am. The rest of the "no work + no internet" time was for deep relaxation, meditation, journaling, eating, etc. In April I went without any internet connection for a week. I was amazed at how much free time I had, but the lack of social interactions was a bit counter-productive. Currently, I'm going offline from the moment I wake up to 7pm. This seems like a good balance where I'm not too tired but still productive throughout the day.

Let me know if you have any question about the process or similar experience to share.

Replies from: crabman
comment by philip_b (crabman) · 2020-05-10T04:28:16.864Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you have any tips on how to make the downloaded documentation of programming languages and libraries searchable?

Btw here's my shortform on how to download documentations of various libraries: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCrTYSWE2TgfNdLhD/crabman-s-shortform?commentId=Xt9JDKPpRtzQk6WGG [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Replies from: mtrazzi
comment by Michaël Trazzi (mtrazzi) · 2020-05-10T11:15:28.977Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for the tutorial to download documentation, I've never done that myself so will check it out next time I go offline for a while!

I usually just run python to look at docs, importing the library, and then do help(lib.module.function). If I don't really know what the class can do, I usually do dir(class_instance) to find the available methods/attributes, and do the help thing on them.

This only works if you know reasonably well where to look at. If I were you I would try loading the "read the docs" html build offline in your browser (might be searchable this way), but then you still have a browser open (so you would really need to turn down wifi).