Make something of the free time at work

I think this is asking the wrong question.

Your team lead might not have realised that the workload is becoming sporadic.

Speak to them, explain the situation, and ask if there are other smaller tasks you could use to fill in the gaps.

If it "wouldn't seem good to bring a book to study at my desk", then it's probably not a good idea to do effectively the same thing on the computer either.

I use https://observablehq.com/ when in constrained environments

Wrong question. You're being paid to work (and earn money for the bank), not work on ad hoc personal projects.

You should go to your supervisor and tell them you either need more work, or would like to establish formal career growth goals.

If your supervisor is not receptive to this, it's time to start looking for another job.

The above assumes you're in a professional role. If you're a teller/clerk and there just aren't customers, I'm not sure - the bank very well may want you sitting idle and available for the next customer. Of course, if that's true, you probably need to look for a new job because they're over-staffed.

1. read ebook. problem solved.

2. make use of Instapaper. save a bunch of articles to read into Instapaper the previous night, come to work and read them via Instapaper.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend Glitch for this situation:

http://glitch.com/

It will give you an IDE and a VM to build projects, and a big community to share/get inspired by. It's sort of like MySpace for web apps.

Solution: https://repl.it

I learned Clojure at my last job when I had downtime. I was restricted from downloading Clojure dependencies which was a pain, so I either used mobile hotspot, or I used repl.it which has about every relevant language in the last 40 years. Many of them come with a web framework to make a web app (which they also host for you for free)

First and foremost, this is your time and you should use it how you see fit.

Here are some random suggestions:

- Solve algorithmic problems on Codewars or HackerRank

- Build an app on Python Anywhere (cloud9.io was a more convenient and versatile remote coding sandbox, but its UX has become much worse after they were acquired by AWS)

- Try to answer some questions on Stack Overflow

- Take a coding course on Codecademy

- Take a ML (or any other) course on Coursera

- Take a language course on Duolingo (you won't be able to do speaking exercises, but you'll still be able to learn)

- Write for your blog (on any platform that you can access - starting a site on your own domain is a good option because it will most likely not be blocked by your filters)

Some of these sites can be blocked on your machine, so choose what is available.

Some man pages are pretty interesting, like the ones for Perl if you use the language.

You could also become really, really good at using a text editor, it becomes a bit of a game and it's going to be useful for as long as you are planning to type.

If it would look bad to read a book at your desk, that would seem to suggest there’s something else your employer expects you to be doing with your time?

Just to add to what others already said : You could also invest in making use of your time to create values in other, more 'social' but techy ways.

I also work in a bank, and started spending some of my idle time preparing to organise meetups, invite external speakers, and find ideas that would contribute to tech for everybody. Things like pushing for the start of a tech blog for example. This usually requires finding the right people, know how to convince, and other things you won't get blocked on, while staying on the tech side. Or even spend time writing one pagers on how your company could become more efficient.

Just another perspective. Not everything you can learn has to do with your computer. you could also spend more time with some of your business pips for example and learn more from their processes.

If you really just want to iterate fast and write code all day, maybe your current environment is not the best for you :).

The old saying goes.. "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean".

Define "clean" as you will for your work context.

Trying to do things that aren't work while you're paid to do work is an easy way to short circuit your career prospects. Don't do that.

Make good use of the time. Talk to your manager about things you could be doing that would improve the codebase you work on and enable you to learn new things. Better yet, make some suggestions.

At my work we organized group trainings, where we all learn X technology together that is related to our jobs in that we could do more if we knew how to use it but don't actually need to use it. Maybe there is some approved software that could be installed that is semi-related to your job.

It sounds like you are in the wrong job. You are a creative thinker and deserve a better suited place for your type of mind. It sounds like you are in a prison of boredom. I would recommend working remotely and have a work machine dedicated and your own personal machine.

I've worked in three different banks and was able to bring my laptop (not connected to the bank network of course), use my headphones to cut the open space noise and listen to anything I want.

As in your bank, proxy was very restrictive, a lot of the web wasn't reachable, but with my laptop when I had free time between projects or issues I could use them for something interesting, and management/security was OK with that.

Seems like hell, just get out of there if you can and have the chance to. In the meantime try to ask for other tasks, or try to refactor some code, there's always room for improvement somewhere, and it's better than looking at the clock for hours a day.

Good luck!

Test your SQL fu: https://mystery.knightlab.com/ No installation needed. All online.

Pretty sure there is a codepen like site for nodejs too. Find it, build something.

I'd arrange meetings with colleagues in other teams and departments to find out what problems they are working on and how you might help. If they have nothing, you could arrange to shadow them for a few hours or half a day. This way you'll find new things to work on, or have a greater understanding of the business and have a larger internal network. Alternatively, if there are ways the business could be improved, you could work on a proposal, and get buy-in and ideas from your colleagues and finally present it to your management.

Use the website PlayOnDocker and run there your experiments with NodeJS, free and out of restrictions. Otherwise, consider buying a VPS or build a VPN at home and doing your experiments on your local server

Read man pages!

These constitute a rabbit hole of extremely interesting documentation. They will help you improve as a developer, and more importantly broaden your horizons beyond what you ever thought was possible. Enjoy!

I used to work at bank too without admin rights. Anaconda has a portable version which can be installed to My Documents folder(if space permits) without need for admin rights. This comes with lots of apps for you to tinker with. Python, numpy, pandas, flask, sqlalchemy and many more.

EDIT: One of my quants did such a great job with Jupiter notebook and anaconda that it is now added to the official list of softwares that we can request for installation.

The raspberry pi is a good suggestion, but if you don't want to be seen bringing outside hardware into the building, you could look into Amazon Workspaces or another remote workstation service, or host your own box and remote into it. Workspaces has a web client for accessing your workspace, so unless Amazon cloud services is specifically blocked at work, you should be able to access it. There's a small monthly fee, but I'd think it'd be well worth it.

If you can't bring a book, then you probably shouldn't bring your own laptop or much anything else. Do you have your phone? Maybe you could do something on that.

You could answer questions on https://stackoverflow.com

If research is something that might be considered work during the day you could hop on Sci-Hub and read some interesting papers.

I used to code using a paper and pencil when away from a machine. It was actually more likely to run without error too.

Can you use https://repl.it ?

You could learn some new tech/patterns on there including NodeJS (https://repl.it/languages/nodejs)

Don't undermine your company or risk being fired.

That said, you can go to LeetCode (or just email yourself screenshots of the problems) and then work on the solutions in Notepad++. Email those solutions to yourself and then, when you get home, you can submit those solutions for credit.

Do you have access to codepen, scrimba or jsfiddle or something similar. There is a lot of front end stuff you could learn just with that to keep you busy for days. Bring in a book or use your phone for a tutorial. G’luck

I have the same issue I used the site glitch to learn Hopefully it works for you

I also work in a bank. We can submit request to install software. Of course we need to get manager's approval. So what kind of software do you use daily?

I'm sure many people have headphones on, download courses on your phone and listen to them, or audio books, nobody needs to know where the sound is coming from !

Maybe use this to learn node? https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9

It would really help to have more details, like what country you're in and what industry, e.g. Banking, Defense, etc.

Could you bring your own laptop? Of course not connecting it to the LAN.

Alternative: use a RPi with your monitor/mouse/keyboard.

You could get very good at vanilla js.

Bring a laptop to work and use that when you have freetime?

are sites like glitch.com and codesandbox.io blocked? they give you a development environment in the browser