Let’s programming offline to gather quality and knowledge

First of all, let’s discuss the history for enlightenment. When we look back to the history, there were offline programmers only. Without the internet, they were using books, frequent discussions and collaboration with colleagues and programming platforms offerings. In comparison to them, we have still significant advantages even in offline mode because we have a compiler at our disposal, we can gather information much more quickly before being offline and often we can postpone the work not possible to do offline to the times when we are working online. But still, there is much to learn from these times..

As the forums are unavailable, you need to cooperate with documentation included in libraries you are using. Well, the quality of the API of open source libraries is indeed various. I was aware of the quality, but I wasn’t used to looking at the documentation of the API when I had the internet and enough experience to know how to ask the right questions. By the way, in this situation is an almost majority of experienced developers - just read the excellent answer about being good developer or just good googler.

And when you are offline, you are very dependent on the documentation. You are forced to go through the API offered, pick up the right classes/methods on your own. That is a good thing! It brings four things:

Just a note, being able to use the libraries in the most efficient way and knowledge about the important internals of libraries brings you variability in programming skills also.

It’s always practical to have sources and documentation of all libraries used in your project in your local repository. For being able to dig into the implementation for searching the useful information or preferred approach of using the library. So I am used to ensuring that all my libraries have sources included when I am adding it to my software. There are many ways how to achieve this so that I would mention the primary ones for Java development:

Also, there are pretty impressive tools with collected documentation from various sources. One for all - Dash for MacOS (and plugin for Intellij Idea). It’s not for free but I would say that it’s most comprehensive and handy tool which you might have installed on your computer. Pretty useful and super fast search capability, various sources, possibility to include individual datasets, etc.

Check also Zeal for Windows and Linux.

But still, it’s always good to have sources/documentation for all the libraries on your classpath to have quick navigation inside the IDE.

Oh, yeah. A developer who didn’t copy-paste code from StackOverflow.com doesn’t exist. A developer who didn’t collect pieces of information and explanations on SO doesn’t exist. So what you are about to do when it’s not available? You have to think first of all. You will have to think about the problem you are trying to solve and find a solution by yourself. It’s a bit weird that sometimes we are looking for the answers outside even for the questions which are answerable after the minute of thinking. But with the luxury of the available knowledge (and with the experience about how to ask) on the internet, it’s pretty common and understandable.

Information online is not available or so slow to retrieve, which means it’s waste of your time. It has a great impact on the knowledge about the libraries and development stack. After tens of hours, you are much more familiar with possibilities that you don’t need to look into API or the internet anymore even when you are online. Of course, it’s a lot of time spent in this area, but, again, it’s most valuable thing you can gather by programming offline.

When your software is cooperating with some third-party service, when you are offline, you can’t connect to her. So now what? It’s overall good practice to produce the stubs for such services for the automation testing purposes to be independent of availability of these services. So you need to enhance your software to be able to use the stubs even for regular application, not only for the tests. It helps for having the ability to run the software locally with all dependencies locally also and in some cases reveals potential problems with integration of such third-party services.

Even when it might not discover all the problems with integration with third-party services, for development speed it’s a must-have. Even with the super fast internet, calling third party services is pretty expensive (or, in better words, time-consuming) and faulty. So you need to enhance application you are working on and introduce stubbing if there is cooperation with external service.

It’s essential to be aligned with the last changes in the version control system. So it’s needed to fetch all the relevant data from VCS before you’re going to be offline. This is always good practice, but when you are offline, you are aware of the importance of being up-to-date even more than in traditional development.

Also, I would like to mention the advantages of Git here. One big advantage is that you can fetch all relevant data without actually apply them to your current work. It’s so much valuable to postpone rebasing/merging to the point when you are prepared for this activity. Also, there is no problem with frequent committing with small and focused changesets. No data needs to be sent to any server, so much effective when you are offline than other not distributed SCM.

Here I collected few tips for to be able to work offline:

After a significant amount of the offline programming sessions, I would like to say that I am regretting that I haven’t started programming offline even before. So I would like to recommend it for every developer. Yes, it’s not always best performing and without connection to repositories and tools you might be pretty limited. But it brings you focus on the most important things, it forces you to be thinking about the best solution and increases the knowledge about a plethora of third-party stuff included in your software. It helps you with self-understanding that you are a real programmer, not only good googler or problem solver. It helps you to re-establish the basics which might be lost in your experience. Also, pain helps you remember deeply. It helps avoid guess and check approach and enforces thinking over the trying plan.

So let’s perform programming in offline mode! Your developer’s life will become better.

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P.S.2 Cover image by Ben White | unsplash.com.