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Comment by Nicholas_C | Hacker News Reader

> In the morning I drive into the city for business, then head back out to the campsite to hike, sit and think, and code. I haven't taken a smartphone with me, so those after-city hours are devoid of the usual notification hail.

You must be a great programmer because there is no way I could program without Stack Overflow/Google.

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Yeah, I said the same thing before I started this. But that's when I'm waste deep in code and I hit the inevitable stumbling block of a weird library bug, missing config option, strange behavior, etc.

That addictive, power-through flow state is hard to maintain without instant SO/Google access, and for many years that was the only way I coded. But I've begun to relish the other mode of programming: the deep thought and careful mental construction of the optimal program, piece by piece, module by module. Sure, I can't bang out as many lines at night, but when I go into the city in the morning I have a mental view of underlying structure – laid out in clear, bold strokes – that makes my SO-enabled coding so much more effective, and directed.*

(*I've noticed that letting SO answer a question prevents any pause which would make you step back from your work and ask "Am I even taking the right approach here?" Low latency, REPLs, and quick access answers make it very easy to go down a rabbit hole – the dark side of exploratory coding.)

And yes, as others have mentioned, I do cache and wget all the docs for whatever tools I'm currently using. With all that, it's hard to get truly stuck, even without the internet.

I'm the same, but I recently discovered that a dump of all Stack Overflow content is available for download. There's a few apps around to easily use it offline. Combine that with the "Dash" app for mac (which downloads other official docs) and it should be pretty easy to work off the grid.

It's not SO or Google but something like Zeal or Dash is useful for offline documentation:

http://zealdocs.org/ (Linux/Windows)

* Zeal is an offline documentation browser inspired by Dash, available for Linux and Windows.

* Quickly search documentation using Alt+Space (or customised) hotkey to display Zeal from any place in your workspace.

* Search in multiple sets of documentation at once.

* Do not depend on your Internet connection.

* Integrate Zeal with IDEA, Sublime Text, or your favourite IDE with a variety of plugins.

https://kapeli.com/dash (OS X)

* Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 150+ APIs (for a full list, see below). You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.

...Maybe it is an age thing? There was a time before Google and Stack Overflow.

There's also a complexity explosion to factor in, and saying that there was a time before Google and Stack Overflow seems a bit dismissive of that. Chances are, your app today is built on at least a dozen dependencies that require documentation and reference lookup several times throughout any given day.

It doesn't take much work to save those offline.

Sure, you miss out on StackOverflow's expertise, but if you really just need to refer to API documentation, that should be doable.

Point taken, but reference material can cover a lot more than API docs. Changes in dependencies, dependencies of dependencies, and their change in source over time are often critical pieces of information. Further, it's difficult to cover all possible material for dependencies that have been taken for granted; OS, HTTP server, drivers, and unexpected complications like OEM-level defects in specific revisions of hardware models are difficult to account for.

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