Swear a lot. Last week I spent the day co-working with a bunch of contractors from the same agency/consultancy. Lovely location (an old pump house by a stream), great food, seats, tables etc except the wifi was awful.
I brought an old under-powered Macbook I had not used for a year or two, but I was going to use codespaces so no problem to run the entire stack. I thought. Codespaces works great from my home office PC...
Constant disconnection meant I eventually gave up on codespaces to directly work on my machine, but then had to try to download the world (brew update, git cloning, a new JVM version, docker images, all new SBT and Scala binaries, transitive dependencies, etc). Granted I caused it by not pre-downloading a more up-to-date dev environment but I was not planning on using it locally. :/
Scraping nails on a school blackboard painful hours later I mostly only did theoretical changes, and spent most of the time chatting/networking.
What we did agree was to put in an offer to the co-working space to set up a decent mesh wifi that can handle lots of people downloading all of maven, using devcontainers, zooming etc. So that we can come back.
SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems. You don't really need a stellar connection for remote coding. If your internet is capable enough for a video call it can run a hundred remote IDEs side by side.
>SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems.
I can't agree with "perfectly fine" here. Not unless you enabled local echo in your terminal emulator. The keyboard latency, especially for typo correction, was maddening. I still remember what a staggering QoL improvement it was the first time I used a low-latency connection to a server.
> It doesn't work perfectly fine over in-flight wifi.
I would hazard a guess that the main problem with in-flight wifi is that it is going to DPI'd beyond recognition.
So you're never going to know what is "real" packet loss and what is the DPI saying "computer says no".
The Sandvine/Procera[1] system that many (most ?) airlines use is an ML-based DPI that looks at absolutely everything in an effort to correlate obfuscated traffic to the actual flow. IIRC they claim 98% accuracy.
Haven't had any issues w/ using VSCode connected to a remote dev environment tbh and we're full remote (Airbnb).
You can always develop locally if you're on the plane or w/e. In our case local builds try to use a remote runner if available if not they happen locally.
I strongly disagree about connectivity being inherently required by software development and therefore an implied part of the job. To take it a step further I believe most developers would benefit from being offline some parts of the day, unless some exceptional circumstances make that unproductive.
That’s ridiculous, you’re conflating productivity (due to slack and meetings, I assume) with fast internet access.
You need to install potentially large packages and images, commit code, and be clear in meetings - that’s a minimal standard for software and if someone can’t do that because they’re on some crazy kbps internet then they’re not suitable for the job.
I live in a country with fast enough 5MB/s and huge ping (300ms+) internet. There is no problem with installing packages, downloading deps and so on, but realtime remote typing or gaming could be really clunky.
Don't forget that you don't need a fast ping for development (with local env). "Good internet" is a very broad definition.
Remote Async means not everybody has a good connection 24/7. Not every position requires being online immediately if it’s not prescheduled. Picture someone doing Van Life across the US with friends. They know they need to get to a Starbucks for the 10am meeting and be at a truck stop for a meeting at 5, but outside those time periods developing locally and having slack for text chat on a spotty connection should be good enough.
No one can guarantee that, at most a remote worker can pick the one (or two if they are lucky) ISPs available to them. Anything beyond that is out of their control.
I have been working fully remote for years from a rural location. My only connection to the Internet is LTE and while it's decent most of the time, there are some days where it's pretty bad.
Luckily my dev environment is local first, which means that a few hours of high packet loss doesn't prevent me from being productive.
Perhaps you should chat with Alan Cox? IIRC, he was on 28k dialup (over a couple of lines) whilst the more metropolitan of us were on ISDN. Adjust your workflow to your environment.
