Filling downtime with purpose
I took a day trip yesterday which involved about four hours total of train travel. Not one to let a good time block like this go to waste, I decided to work some more on an upcoming project of mine. A catch is that I often need to look up extra information online, while I would be cut-off from most everything there. While, yes, there is on-board wifi, it's best not to rely on that. Having a limited mobile plan, I didn't want to use my phone as a hotspot. So, offline it was!
I made sure I had all the files I would need pre-downloaded before starting, then configured my tablet with my usual development tools. The smaller device (plus attached keyboard) is light enough to carry around all day, yet has the ability to do everything I need it to.
Since I wouldn't have a live connection, I decided to focus my work on making the system more reliable. This specific project needs to read data from external sources once in a while, but what happens if these sources are temporarily offline? This was a perfect opportunity to test it for real! I found several weird behaviors and outright bugs that I was able to correct, so that by the time this goes live, unusual scenarios like bad connections will already be handled properly.
One small problem: I ran out of battery before going home! I'm not sure what happened, since it's supposed to last longer than this, but maybe I didn't configure something right. That will be something to review... or bring the charger along!
– Doctacosa