So I'm sitting in a trampoline recreation center for my sister's party. Chaperoning and Chaffeuring around. With some downtime, and not in the physical fitness to jump around, it felt like a good time to pull out the laptop to work on some side projects.
At a few of these places, they offer guest networks as a common courtesy. Unfortunately, some of the free WI-FI connections aren't that great, and I could not get a solid connection. What's a guy to do?
In periods of network downtime, here are a few things I have done to feel slightly more productive.
Program by Guessing.
How many times have you tried this? Picking up a new programming language, or framework, we let the IDE and it's QuickStart be our guide. Whenever I come from a language that's similar, I do a little divination, programming by guessing at what the method names or standard library names are. Sometimes we can get lucky.This time was not one of those times.
Dissecting Examples
I'm pretty new to Android Development. For the short time I was without internet, I was thinking of doing something simple. I opened up a few template projects, and played with wiring up the different templates together. Android Studios' UI Builder was a definite good use of my time.
I'm sure a lot of you have done this before. I opened up an Android Project through Android Studio, and started relying on AutoCompletes. I did rely on hitting Firebase for my application, and without access to the network, I started a little service of my own. I'm pretty comfortable with Rails, so I created a small API Service and routed the firebase urls to my localhost.
Write Tests
There's probably not enough test coverage when we're building our personal projects. Some form of test coverage would be great to do.
Future-Proof solution. Download it now!
While doing a little research, I came across devdocs.