I spent the last month on the Caribbean coast in Costa Rica, largely working on Jekyllhub. Hey, don’t hate, I sunburn at the drop of a hat. My swimming / beach watching was done entirely at sunrise & sunset. If you’re interested, you can check out my photos here.

The area of coast I was on had very low bandwidth. Most of the restaurants that advertised Wifi had a single 3G card or dongle they used to run the wireless network. I found two places with DSL lines, both of which were hostels not too keen on having interloping developers. The 3G dongle I managed to get was slow at best, and utterly unreliable about half the time. So most of trying to develop there was an act of more patience than I really have - type in a bash command into a remote terminal, wait ten seconds for it to show up, hit enter, wait again, watch results, debug. It gives me a real appreciation for when server time was a prized university asset, and you had to hand your cards or programs over to other people to be run.

Here’s a bunch of things I found really useful to stay off the internet as much as possible while developing my project. Some of these are probably obvious, but maybe you’ll see something new. And even if you have a good internet connection, the speed of local resources is incredible. It’s nice to have even though I’m back in civilization.

  1. yard server -g the yard gem gives you great documentation for all your ruby gems. I set this to run nohup in the background on an unused port and made an entry in /etc/hosts so it’s easy to get to.
  2. yard for ruby core / ruby stdlib - bookmark the static files and you’re good to go
  3. jqAPI - jquery documentation in the style of YARD. Since it’s super ajazzy and doesn’t work with the file:// protocol, I had to pull some hacks to get it to work. It runs on a jekyll server in nohup / background mode with a /hosts alias.
  4. Twitter Bootstrap comes with local documentation; you just have to remember to put it somewhere.
  5. GMail basic html really is a lot faster than regular GMail on a flaky connection, and it handles timeouts better.
  6. Facebook Mobile looks really nice in a narrow second window, and runs a lot better on an unreliable line than normal, full-sized facebook does.

All that provided basically all the local documentation I needed, and a few ways to connect with other folks to talk about issues and whatnot. Hope it helps someone else out there! -