My internet connection at home is gone. I’m migrating ADSL ISP’s and it appears my old ISP has cut me off and my new ISP is not quite ready for me. “Due to demand, expect to wait three business days beyond your activation date”. Last night I tried to write some code.

Now, coding at home is always painful. At work I have dual monitors and a reasonably powerful box with plenty of RAM (for the coding I do, which is very little and mostly scripting, for real programming that my team do, not really powerful enough. But since I’ve wandered up to manage them, it doesn’t matter that my box sucks).

At home, however, I’ve got a 4 year old laptop that cost £300 when I bought it. With a 15″ screen. At home I’m doing the same kind of scripting, but, it’s just less productive due to raw power of machine and lack of screen real estate.

And now I have no internet.

I can’t remember when exactly I made the transition from referencing books (”In a nutshell” or “Pocket reference” books when I needed something, or checking a “Cookbook” for a recipe, or perhaps even using the MSDN CD) to relying 100% on Google and the wider internet. But it seems I’ve done so. And loosing the internet when I’m coding is like loosing a limb.

It’s easy enough to deal with not having the internet to surf and in fact distract me. But not having it to bail me out when I’m stuck is terrible. Jeff Atwood just said, entirely in passing:

I can barely program these days without an active internet connection; I feel crippled when I’m not networked into the vast hive mind of programming knowledge on the internet.

And he’s right. It’s horrible. His main point was about coding with other people so that you can bounce off each other etc, which is also important. But the lack of the internet as the solution to all your dead-ends is even worse.

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This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 2 years, 9 months ago on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:04 am and is filed under Development, Opinion. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 13% [?]. It has been tagged with internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.