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I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.

For me I always pocket my phone or e-reader at each stop, unless I'm in Japan or Taiwan.

Vibe coders feeling a great disturbance in the force.

I spent the first year at that job commuting into DC 2-3 days/week, which involved about an hour drive, then an hour regional commuter train, then some Metro transfer and walking — then back again in the evening. I spent that train time offline (as it was 2004) learning the Apple Cocoa frameworks, as in another twist of fate, the company was entirely Apple laptop-based, which was fairly rare for 2004, and I built tools for the team and myself. The focus possible because I was offline, with comprehensive docs, was pretty intense and was a huge part of many aspects of my career to follow.

The subway produced so many repeatable network connection edge case problems. It was fantastic.

It was essentially forced meditation, and it helped me a lot in reorganizing my thoughts.

I had moved next to the office later, and noticed that I’d really missed those meditative hours. I saved maybe 1.5 hours of commute every day but my net productivity had declined.

I don’t think it would be as easy to achieve the same effect today as it was back then. We now have phones and interactive ads, and that dopamine driven economy.

I miss that about those times.

Suffice to say, after almost two years of this, I was extremely tired and sleep deprived as this ate away at my available time more than what is reasonable. Using the time for personal projects didn't compensate for it. Never again, it's really not worth it.

These days Caltrain is faster and has occasionally frustrating, but fairly good Wi-Fi, so now my constraints are that I don't have a large monitor but not really much else.

1. Cell service has become low-latency. This is very different from "fast", which it has also become! When I started working from the train (on HSPA+), pings in the hundreds of milliseconds were the norm. My first step was usually to SSH to a remote machine, and let just the text lag on me. Nowadays, I can run a Web browser locally without issue.

2. Cell service has, at the same time, become ubiquitous in subway tunnels. When I started, there were some areas that dropped down to EDGE (unusable), and some areas that had no service at all. Now, there is exactly one place on the Boston transit system - Back Bay Station - where I lose cell service.

3. Noise cancelling tech has gotten better. It's not just about noise cancelling headphones: both of my laptops (a 2024 MBP and a ThinkPad P14s) have microphones that can filter out screeching wheels and noisy teenagers quite well. That means I can take meetings without making them miserable for the people on the other end.

These, honestly, are a huge game-changer for me. The ability to take a 30 minute meeting while commuting, where otherwise I would've had to get in early or stay late at work, actually does wonders for my ability to have a life outside of work.

The longer train I would use my laptop, same with the 20min underground section on the journey in (going home no chance), but for the packed train and the walk I listened to music (I still have my Diamond Rio PMP300, no idea if it still works, just remember downsampling music to 32kbps to get more on a memory card, quality was less important than quantity - I must have listened to David Gray’s album _White Ladder_ many hundreds of times).

Toshiba laptops (Satellite? I think they were before the Tecras), heavy and the battery life wasn’t much more than 90 minutes but it was just enough. Dual booting Windows and Linux. (Linux for dev work on the go…)

Obviously no mobile connectivity back then, I had to have a plan for what I was going to work on and that also involved backup plans if I ran into a blocker on the primary. Same for the way home.

A bit later I could get GPRS data rates via Infra-Red to my mobile and that just felt like magic.

I found the times I couldn’t be on my laptop (walking or on the packed train) were great for thinking problems through and often had to stop to scribble down thoughts/ideas/solutions in a notebook that I kept in the laptop bag.

Wrote so much useful code in that 18 months without the distractions of the Internet or emails or whatever.

Now I somehow find I have less time despite having virtually no commute. Technology has vastly increased the number of distractions and I have let myself succumb to them. Where I had no real choice in what music I listened to now I have too much choice. There’s always one last thing to check before I get on with a bit of work. Sometimes I wish for simpler times.

It’s nice to be less tethered to a desk, while also not having to carry a backpack and heavier full laptop, but still able to remote in and do what I need to do. I really enjoy having a fully capable Linux PC in my pocket vs a smartphone.

I sometimes do "iPad work", which is essentially researching, reviewing and annotating content on my iPad Mini. I will hop on my bike and work an hour or two in different locations, over coffee or in the sun. It's a relaxing break from working on a computer at a desk.

I do think that people should work in different places. Perhaps we'd have apps that work better on slow internet.

All my experience with public transportation is having to roll the dice and more often than not losing - having to stand while packed liked sardines into a bus or subway.

I gave myself the rule of no internet while on the train, so sometimes I would just accumulate a list of questions I wanted to answer later.

There is definitely something to it, and you can get heaps done, but it needs to be supported with some non-train time (e.g. for me, it was all the app store stuff, debugging with real hardware, etc)

More generally, I find that switching up your surroundings is absolutely vital for your brain's ability to focus on hard tasks. I will hit a wall if I try to work multiple 10+ hour days sitting in one spot, but a comfortable spot in a different coffee shop or lounge can totally trick my brain into powering through.

But on longer trips from e.g. upper Manhattan to deep Brooklyn, particularly at off-peak hours when I have room to spread out—yeah, I’ve had some very productive sessions.

This reminded me of the "walking desk" Stephen Wolfram uses to program:

https://content.wolfram.com/sites/43/2019/02/07-popcorn-rig1...

I tried to use a similar one during Covid and couldn't get into it at all.

That's why whenever I move to a new city, I typically look to live somewhere that's at the end of the metro line. It meant in the morning commute I can _always_ get a seat.

That was one of the reasons I liked living in Hammersmith when I worked in Shoreditch/Old Street - it's at the end of the Hammersmith and City Line and I don't have to change lines. There's also the add bonus that the line is above ground until Paddington which meant I have more than enough time to load up any tabs I need to use before the Internet blackout.

In Hong Kong I worked at Central and lived in Tsuen Wan. Literally from one end of the line to the other. This had the added bonus that I was also guaranteed a seat on the way home as well.

I actually feel like oversea flights are my most productive sessions.

I could totally see my using the train to drive through the country to work on some stuff, where I barely need internet.

It’s almost always better than my 49 inch monitor at home lol.

You can use commute time for day dreaming. It's not a waste of time

One thing I love about coding on public transport is the sense of urgency can be fun.

Being on the verge of figuring out a bugfix or whatever when you know train is pulling into the station and you have maybe a minute to go, cracking it, quick test, bundle the laptop quickly back into your bag as you step off the train is quite a nice feeling.

No access to internet so mostly hacking from memory. I could use man pages for C, but Haskell was a bit more tricky.

Sometimes I’d just end up sketching things out on paper, but eventually I could complete entire modules without looking anything up. Was always a bummer to be stuck on something that I knew could be answered online in mere seconds. Good times.

I would absolutely never do this in a public place, much less a crowded one.

This guy’s figured it out though.

https://evantravers.com/articles/2023/04/06/magsafe-tenting-...

It's often less productive than a normal workday so i dont do it super often, but It's very enjoyable, and the change of scenery sometimes helps me get unstuck on problems.

There is no cellular data in the NYC subway? I had to look it up online and apparently there is but coverage is quite patchy. That's very surprising to learn, NYC being one of the most developped and richest cities in the world. By comparison, and from my experience, the Parisian metro has excellent coverage.

But I’ve never felt comfortable opening a laptop on the NYC subway. It wasn’t about the safety that OP describes. It was about the culture and the physical configuration (facing middle with strap hangers vs facing front/back). It just didn’t feel right in the subway.

I do miss the MetroNorth Bar Car! I could drink and code and it was jovial.

An intercity train with wifi/cell service (and tea!) is an incredible focussing function as well. You got 3 hours and a beautiful not too distracting view. Go!

P.s. I also suggested to Stephen that he gets a Nathan Fielder “laptop harness” for his subway work..? Has anyone tried this?

[0] https://ask.metafilter.com/316039/Ideas-for-workspaces-pleas...

After our standup in the morning, the graphics artists would have made tons of drawings on the paper table cloth. If they had access to a pen and paper, they would be drawing.

Lucky you. :) Good problem to have.

This has to be satire.

All on a Chromebook with crostini. Cheap, long battery life and decent keyboard.

At 5:30am each weekday in the early 1970s, a bus pulled up to a stop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a young man lugging a bag that bulged with papers mounted its steps. He was making the two-hour commute to New York City, where he worked at the investment­ banking firm of Drexel Firestone. The train would have provided a more comfortable and faster ride; but, for those very reasons, it also offered more opportunity to meet other Wall Street acquaintances. They would want to engage in the kind of idle small talk that commuters share to pass the time. The thought must have been intolerable. He did not wish to be rude, but he wanted no interrup­tion.

As soon as he had settled into his seat, being sure to take one with an empty one adjacent, he unloaded a mountain of prospectuses and 10ks (annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings) onto the seat next to him. On winter mornings the sky was still pitch black and the light on the bus was too dim for him to be able to read. He wore a leather aviation cap with the earflaps down; he had been bald for years, and although he wore a toupee his head always felt cold on these frosty mornings. Now over his aviation cap he fitted a miner's headlamp -- strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead.

Now I program casually in public spaces, including the underground, on my GPD Micro PC [0]. It, too, has attracted numerous glimpses and been a conversation starter on some occasions.

[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-p...

Figured he just used the metro as his workplace.

The lack of internet on the bus has not really been a problem since I plan ahead and make sure any dependencies I need are already downloaded.

I use an old (2010 era) Toshiba netbook which is small enough that I'm not causing problems for my seat neighbours. It's also only got a dual-core 1GHz processor which kind of forces me to find performant solutions to problems.

Much like the author I've also been thinking about how I can make my setup more portable. I've been considering purchasing AR glasses and using my Charachorder2 so I don't even need to get the netbook out of my bag. At this stage I can't justify the cost of a pair of AR glasses though.

Some recent projects my commute has given me the time to work on:

- a text editor (OCaml, SDL)

- a 3D game (C, OpenGL)

- an x86 operating system (Zig)

Laptops sometimes have stickers. For a time, I instead had a transparent slip cover, to vary the sticker set, user-test alternatives, and throttle conversations. Science education topics (Boston/Cambridge subway). Anti-patriarchy stickers drew proto-MAGAs. Some backpacks now have low-res screens built into the back, suggesting new possibilities.

One Laptop Per Child, at its peak, generated fun continuous crowd conversations.

> a pair of glasses with a screen inside of them

I've no idea what current tech is like, but I use to proselytize aphysical UIs, where a small head motion results in larger screen motion, to reduce neck swiveling.[1]

> weirder

Laptop harness walking desks are a thing. And one can do hand and head tracking[2] (I had that setup at a meetup where the swag was little stick-on privacy shutters for laptop webcams :). Boston/Cambridge is perhaps culturally a best case for such games - I've not tried them in NYC... hmm.

> but something very complex, [...] instead sketch out a diagram on a piece of paper [...] keep a small notebook in my bag

Same. I've tried swapping in an iPad, but it hasn't stuck.

[1] silly old demo, 5k on a bus: https://x.com/mncharity/status/1225091755667853318 [2] https://imgur.com/a/keyboard-cam-Z1VipaL

Much better experience than working on a plane. I've done a handful of cross-US flights this year on Alaska Airlines, and trying to do anything network-related on those flights was torture. Super spotty, high latencies, constant timeouts; very frustrating.

It’s overall time much better spent than being stuck in a car.

It's not something I'd want to do on the daily but if you really need to get something done and are running out of time (those busses get stuck in traffic for half an hour or more), it's doable.