[chriszhang]

I wish I could limit the use of Internet to 1 hour per day. Like the olden days in the early days of internet.

Internet was given in our university for only 1 hour per day. It was possible to live in this manner even when I used to do programming. All programming documentation was available as PDFs or downloadable copies. I remember the MSDN documentation for C++ could be kept on the local machine. For Python I used to keep a PDF copy of the tutorial and reference i think.

These days I don't know anymore if that style of working will still work. Software has become so complex and error messages have become so many and so complex that I think we need access to internet all the time while programming. To see resolution to strange errors in Stack Overflow or on GitHub issues.

I wish all software developers did not assume that I am connected to the Internet all the time. It will be good if we can have a world where local-first internet-optional style of programming is still there.

[aimor]

I often do work without direct internet access and it's painful at times. PDF documentation is wonderful, but when that's not available I sometimes save entire websites. Other useful things: dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, world maps, reference books. It was surprisingly difficult to find a free dictionary file.

Overall it's not very different, just inconvenient at times, and the lack of distractions is nice. I echo your wish for local-first programming.

[GloriousKoji]

At the beginning of lockdown last year I thought it would be a fun projects to build a doomsday-type local internet. Just a raspberry pi with it's own AP hosting various offline version of reference websites.

I thought it would be pretty low effort: maybe a few scripts to crawl some websites and then a few scripts to spit out html. I never got passed acquiring all the references. Most of the available stuff is from over 10 years ago. Wikipedia's convenient snapshot are from 2008, the dictionary files I found seemed to be based on Merriam Webster from 2009 and I couldn't find a good reference for scientific unit conversions just to name a few.

In the end I shelved it since it was going to be much more than quick project. But I must say that i'm impressed with Gutenberg project on how they provide an option to download all their books.