Last weekend I went away for the Bank Holiday, a spur of the moment decision. We (my wife, our dog and I) headed north to Dundee and stayed a few nights up at Piperdam. We've been before and so knew what to expect. Lovely open plan cabins, private hot tub, dog friendly and no wifi and limited phone signal.
Piperdam is about 10mins drive outside of Dundee, which is one of Scotland's main cities and a massive player in the computer games industry, but within those 10mins you lose all phone signal and the resort has chosen not to install wifi in any of its cabins. If you really want access to the internet, you can log in down at the reception / bar / restaurant, which is a 5 min walk from the cabins.
We can usually get just enough phone signal to stream some music but if you want to go online and "surf" or "doom-scroll" forget it. It's like going back to the early 90s with dodgy dial-up modems. Actually, I take that back, the 90s was faster, and yes, I did experience that first hand. I know I don't look old enough to have been around at the birth of The Internet. Trust me, Tiree in the 90s on a 56k modem and shared phone line was not fun for a geek like me!
Patience....
When away, I always take my laptop with me. My wife enjoys reading, I tend to watch movies, design lego models or play some offline games - old skool!
But last weekend I wanted to work on a new feature for this site, the activities section. I had made a start earlier in the week and had cloned the repo locally. This site runs on Umbraco Cloud and as I opened up my laptop on Saturday afternoon, after a lovely long walk in the morning with Toby and Mrs W, I hit my first problem. I couldn't log in to the backoffice of my local environment without accessing Umbraco Cloud authentication!
I tethered my phone to my laptop, balanced it on the windowsill where I got 1 bar of 5G signal and started the sign in process. It was slow but I was in. Once I was logged in, I tried to make a local user account but I found I couldn't.
After a quick search of the Umbraco docs, I say a quick search, I mean, after really thinking about my search terms, waiting for google to find the results and then eventually loading the docs, I had my answer. You can only make a local user after you have successfully logged in via Umbraco Cloud, logged out and then logged back in. Once you've done this, you can then make a new local user account.
30 mins later - I had a local user setup on my local environment and I could untether my phone and work 100% offline.
Offline coding
Now I was fully offline - the fun really started. I've become all too dependant on Claude and Copilot when it comes to helping me out. These tools are not available to me on a slow or no connection so I got back to finding the joy of troubleshooting.
I had devtools open, and I was messing about with css classes and styles. I had breakpoints on my code and diving deep in to arrays trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the results I expected.
I refactored a couple of methods and views because it made sense to do it and because I could.
The views had a load of logic in them, because Claude thought it was the place to put it last week, but with some time on my hands, that was all moved in to ViewComponents and I reused some services I had setup previously and created some new ones.
When I really couldn't work something out, I stopped. I thought about the problem. I tethered my phone to my laptop again and made very precise requests so that I could get the answer quickly.
It wasn't a conversation with AI. I know what I wanted and I knew how to get the result.
If I had a new idea for a feature it was because I had thought of it, not because AI had suggested it. When I created the feature it was my own code that created it, not AI.
It's crazy how quickly we've become dependant on AI and how easy it could be for us to lose the joy of coding.
Yes, it was slower. Yes I can see the advantage of using AI when it comes to "paid work" but as a hobby, sometimes, throwing AI out the window is liberating. I studied Software Engineering because I enjoyed coding. I enjoyed the problem solving. The knowledge that I've made a program that does something - even if it does it badly, I made it.
I still enjoy coding as a hobby and last weekend was very enjoyable.
No AI here
The other side of all of this is I also sat down over the weekend and wrote this blog, I fired up Obsidian and wrote this all offline.
Every word, grammatical error, spelling mistakes, is all my work. No AI generated content and I enjoyed sitting down and typing it up.
There is way too much AI generated guff popping up recently, either on socials or on blog sites that I respect and it really stands out. I've found myself starting to read articles and getting a few paragraphs in and giving up because the article had no identity, it felt like it was missing a soul.
This sounds very dramatic but I hope it makes sense. Please, if you are reading this and you now only publish AI generated content, really ask yourself, could you have written something better yourself? I bet you could.
Give it a go
I highly recommend a full unplug - no laptop, no phone every so often but I also recommend a no internet day too when it comes to coding. You'll quickly realise how much you use AI, how much it's your default go-to. You will also realise how your habits have changed when it comes to finding information online. It used to be open up Altavista, Yahoo, AOLOnline, Google and type in your search query. Now, it's just open up Claude or Copilot from within your IDE and boom, you have the answer or it's actually made the changes for you without you typing a single line of code.
I really enjoyed messing about with my code, styles and thinking for myself.
Give a no internet day a go and let me know how you get on.