The solution: use the server as little as necessary, do as much as you can on your device.
Use Git.
Version control, yes, but more importantly, already optimized for p2p and sneakernet.
It allows for collaboration.
You can take a project someone else started, and finish it.
There's already a whole bunch of gui programs available on all major operating systems to track and manage repositories, nothing needs to be built to start. It's ready to go.