My biggest problems with trying to work in a variety of public places (coffee shops, libraries, universities, Panera, lobbies of various buildings, whatever) are:
- Lack of large display. I can't really do anything serious on a laptop anymore. I know I used to before large displays are affordable, but it just feels indispensable now - for development work, at least.
- LATENCY! Public wifi hotspots suffer from lack of QoS policing or fair queueing, and there are always going to be a few annoying people with virus-laden Windows laptops around to help slow things down. I work on large telecom systems that pretty much require me to do my development remotely via SSH and/or SSHFS and/or NFS over VPN; there is no local development alternative for me. I can't cram my stuff onto a laptop. So, if I have to deal with substantial lag (consistent or spikes) over an SSH session my productivity just circles the drain.
- Lack of large display. I can't really do anything serious on a laptop anymore. I know I used to before large displays are affordable, but it just feels indispensable now - for development work, at least.
- LATENCY! Public wifi hotspots suffer from lack of QoS policing or fair queueing, and there are always going to be a few annoying people with virus-laden Windows laptops around to help slow things down. I work on large telecom systems that pretty much require me to do my development remotely via SSH and/or SSHFS and/or NFS over VPN; there is no local development alternative for me. I can't cram my stuff onto a laptop. So, if I have to deal with substantial lag (consistent or spikes) over an SSH session my productivity just circles the drain.