Being completely offline is rare these days, but it used to happen more often on a long train ride or during a power outage with a dying laptop battery. In those moments, I still wanted to program, and the experience was incredibly revealing. Programming offline shows you exactly what you've mastered and where your gaps are.
Without Stack OverFlow, Reddit, Discord or AI, you're left with only your intuition, local source code and your own knowledge. It's true test of skill. I realized I could spin up a web server in Java from memory, but the front-end was a different story. I quickly had to admit I lost with CSS without Googling properties or checking MDN. I ended up hunting throught old projects on my SSD just to find styles I could reuse.




