Be Ready For Offline

The worst just happened, my internet went down. As in down for hours, not minutes, and no reprieve in sight. This points to obvious holes in my workflow towards some clients at Odd Alice, necessary holes in all but one cases, but holes nonetheless.

You see I prefer to develop on a live server. For most sites that’s not a problem, you won’t destroy things with your code if you’re careful and keep your development install separate from the public one. Some projects are unsuited for this, possibly because faulty code could kill the server or something, I don’t know, I’m just saying it so that you’ll be cautious.

All that aside, developing on a live server when the internet is down is pretty hard.

That’s why I keep local copies, as up to date as I can be bothered to. Ideally all these should be in svn or git, making them always up to date, but we’re transitioning now so all that stuff isn’t setup for the optimal workflow.

Man, do I regret that now, writing this column on my iPhone at a very quiet office.

The lesson is this: Be ready for offline so that you won’t lose any work time.

Got it? Good. Then I can get back to work, because I’ve already learned this lesson the hard way, despite whatever I wrote above. I just took this opportunity to procrastinate a bit, and tell you a story I wish I had heard before.

Now if only I could publish this column…

Photo by photosteve101 (CC)

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• developers