My Flutter story

Probably, this is one of those topics I'm the most excited to write about. The story began 1.5 years ago when I wanted to develop an app for learning new English words. If you'd asked me why didn't I take one of plenty of existing apps, I wouldn't have a rational answer. I've needed a brand new app for Android and iOS to study English with my girlfriend. (Spoiler Alert! I've never written one.)

So, I've started to look for ways to build such an app without learning Android/Kotlin and iOS/Swift. I've stumbled upon a video on YouTube that was comparing several cross-platform technologies. I guess they were React Native, Xamarin, and Flutter. I despised weakly-typed Javascript and Microsoft's version of Java - C# that went in pair with the first two technologies (I haven't even tried to understand how these frameworks work internally). At the same time, I've needed a breath of fresh air. So, I've started a pretty long course on Flutter/Dart (40+ hours) on Udemy and completed it in two months.

Probably somewhere here, I need to give a quick intro to the framework for those who don't know what it is.

Flutter is an open-source UI SDK created and released by Google in 2017. It is used to develop natively-compiled multi-platform apps from a single codebase, i.e., apps for Web, Desktop (Linux, Windows, macOS), and Mobile (Android, iOS). I think Java's slogan can be applied to Flutter: "Write once, run everywhere."
The framework heavily relies on Dart language (another invention from Google). So Flutter developers mostly write Dart code. For me, it is something between Java and Javascript. Not so cumbersome, but still statically typed.

Enough of theory for now. I'll need another post to list all the features of the Flutter/Dart stack and tell you what makes it better/worse than other solutions.

After the course on Udemy, I started making a Quiz app for my Mobile development classes at Uni and learning new libraries and approaches from ResoCoder's videos, the official Flutter channel on YouTube, and different thematic conferences like DartUp, Mobius, Flutter Live/Engage/Interact. Not to mention that I was freelancing with Python/Django here and there at that time. I've become acquainted with many topics: declarative UI, streams, state management, architecture, error handling, networking, Firebase, caching, theming, localization, notifications, and more.

Seven months after I first heard about the framework, I landed my first job as a Flutter developer. Since then, I've been working on several projects, and most of them are under NDA.

#flutter #career