I dread traveling, I especially dislike those guided tours where you sit on a bus for hours, being shuttled from point of interest A to B.
If the content of the tour wasn't dry enough, the long hours of just doing nothing is often enough to drive me insane.
However, it is during these times of absolute mundanity that some of my most creative ideas spring to life.
They say that traveling broadens the mind, broadens the horizons, or something along those lines. I have come to appreciate this saying, because I think that it holds true regardless of whether you enjoy the trip or not.
Try it out for yourself, just sit in an empty room, or at the park, somewhere without your phone, and just stare blankly into space. You'd be surprised just how quickly your mind comes up with interesting ideas.
Take the time to have a moment of self reflection, and do some deep Introspection. Assess your current situation and how you can use it, or navigate it, to improve yourself or achieve your goals.
On an unrelated note, Sandpack is cool.
I've decided to use this post as a sandbox of sorts.
Mobile Coding
Oftentimes, I wish I could code on the go. Unfortunately, I can't always be carrying a laptop with me at all times.
On the other hand, I do have a phone, which almost never leaves my side, so why not try coding on that instead?
Mobile IDEs do exist, but they often lack the ability to run and debug applications, making it difficult to prototype and iterate on your code.
Alternatively, perhaps its possible to use a terminal emulator such as Termux to run applications, or to just push your changes to a development branch and deploy it, but I find that the overall developer experience is still far too cumbersome.
Cloud Workspaces
Fortunately, GitHub Workspaces is a thing, which happens to be what I'm using to type this out right now.
It's basically VSCode, but your code is executed on the cloud, using containers and all that virtualization stuff.
The ability to actually run this application on the cloud is nothing short of amazing, it's almost magical.
Praise be our cloudy tech overlords!
It's incredibly convenient, although the typing experience does leave much to be desired, but there's only so much you can do with such a tiny screen.
Tips and tricks
PWA
Using Github Workspaces in a browser can be pretty frustrating at times, which is why I recommend installing it as a Progressive Web App.
In the browser of your choice, find the option to "Add to homescreen", it's often somewhere in the ellipses/options menu.
Installing the website as an app gives you more screen real estate, and removes the chances of you accidentally pressing the wrong buttons.
My current approach is to use the browser to view my app while using the Codespace as a PWA, giving me something close to a local development experience.
On the plus side, running the app on the cloud really helps with the battery life.
Layouts
Developing on a tiny screen doesn't have the best viewing experience, largely because of how little code you can fit in your viewport at a time.
Prepare to either do a lot of swiping, or sacrificing the typing experience by using landscape mode.
Conveniently, VSCode allows you to easily modify the IDE layout to your liking.
In the top right corner of the IDE, there are these small icons that represent the layout.
Click on them to toggle the visibility of these layouts, such as hiding the terminal or file explorer.
I personally prefer to hide everything when I type, so that I can actually see what I'm doing.
It also helps significantly to set a smaller font size.
Floating Keyboard
If you prefer to use landscape mode, I find that it helps significantly to use a "floating" keyboard, which is a feature on mobile keyboards like GBoard.
It makes the keyboard much smaller, and let's you drag it around the screen, which makes for a better code viewing experience, in my humble opinion.
The downside is that typing becomes much harder, because of the smaller keyboard.
Mobile Hacks
Sometimes, you might find that the keyboard gets in the way, particularly when trying to open menus.
The solution is have a tab open that doesn't allow typing, like a markdown preview page.
Switch to that tab when you need to interact with the IDE's UI, and the keyboard will stop popping up in your face.
Alternatively, double tap on your current code tab to make it focus, now the keyboard should stop getting in your way.
Keyboard Settings
Disable "Use on-screen keyboard" in your phone settings.
This magically fixes some of the annoying pop-up on my specific phone (POCO F4 GT).