Coding on the (United) Plane

Two missing resources

For personal travel I usually fly with JetBlue. For work, however, I’m usually forced to fly with United since it’s the only airline with nonstop service for my typical itinerary.

Like many airlines, United doesn’t offer free Wifi; it’s usually $8-$10 per segment. (JetBlue thankfully offers it for free.) On principle, I’m opposed to paying for internet access in the air. Given that a month’s worth of fast internet at home usually costs $40-$80, it’s annoying to pay the equivalent of 10%-20% of the monthly ISP bill for just a few hours of slow and sometimes unreliable internet access on the plane. So even when it’s on someone else’s dime, I’ll only purchase an internet pass if I have a seriously critical need–which is rarely the case.

A lot of my work can be done offline anyways. For coding, however, it’s hard to work offline without access to:

1. developer web docs
2. developer forums (e.g. StackOverflow)

Offline docs at devdocs.io/

DevDocs is a nice resource I’ve come across for consolidating documentation across a wide range of packages. I wish I had found it sooner. The site itself is regularly updated with the latest official documentation for 250+ common languages, libraries, and frameworks. Importantly, it also lets you choose which bodies of documentation you want to store locally in the browser for offline access.

Free(?) United Wifi

To my best knowledge, there’s no hack to get the paid United Wifi service for free. Due to the way that United Wifi is set up, however, you can always access *.google.* domains for free.

Usually this means you can search for code questions and preview some potential answers.

Other reflections

Back in the day, one of my friend’s colleagues found a workaround to get 100% Wifi access and wrote a Flask app for managing the small redirect required. Check out his blog post and GitHub repo. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it to work on the routes I’ve flown. But it’s still an interesting hacking project.