What's your ideal indie hacking setup?

Last night I went to a Tim Hortons to work on my side project. Tim Hortons is a Canadian-based cafe chain that Burger King now owns. Their coffee is significantly cheaper than Starbucks; unfortunately, their quality matches their low price. I go there often because I am thrifty and they're open till late.

I was building MongoDB collections for my marketing app, defining data types and then seeding the database with some dummy data. It was one of those coding tasks that don't require 100% of your brain's capacity. So you can safely set 60% on autopilot and then focus the rest on whatever you want. I usually listen to a podcast while coding.

However, yesterday I sat beside a table of old-timers. There's a retirement home in our neighbourhood, and you see many of its residents at that Tim Hortons. Their conversation was so interesting that I didn't feel like putting on my headphones.

The table had one lady and one gent with thick eastern European accents and another gent with a Canadian accent. The lady talked about buying a rejuvenation cream after seeing a YouTube ad and complained that the cream failed to live up to its promise. So she wrote a "letter" (email) to the company requesting a refund, and they immediately wrote back to her acknowledging the receipt of her letter. The person with the Canadian accent interrupted her, pointing out that she was, in fact, chatting with a robot.

He then lamented that his Polish friends have utter disregard for articles and tenses. Many more topics were discussed, interrupted, and dropped during the rest of the conversation. Meanwhile, I kept thinking that this was the best atmosphere for hacking:

• Late night
• Cheap coffee
• Eavesdropping on another table's conversation.

What about you? What's your ideal indie hacking setup?