This week in Flutter #109: Attending Fluttercon 23
I have been to Fluttercon 23 this week. I met a lot of people and listened to many talks. I decided to dedicate this issue to my favorite ones, among those I attended.
Videos and slides are not available yet, except for a couple of them, but I will update the newsletter website with the links when they will be. I tried to add related resources from the same author if I could find any.
First of all, I liked all the keynotes. In particular, I enjoyed how Eric Seidel forecasts what the upcoming wave of Flutter developers will need from the platform and the community. They will most likely use Flutter not because of passion, but because of a choice made for them. So they will be less understanding of the platform’s shortcomings and issues in community-maintained packages. We, as “early adopters”, need to make sure that they will not dislike working with Flutter.
David DeRemer’s keynote focused on culture. The platform is not what makes Flutter developers happy. It is the culture that most Flutter teams seem to share.
I highly suggest you have a look at both talks, when they are available online.
- Michele Volpato
🎙️ Fluttercon 23 talks
A Year of Headaches: How not to build a realtime multiplayer game
by Craig Labenz
In this talk, there was very little code. It was more about the journey rather than the game, or Flutter. Craig found that sometimes the right solution consists of fewer lines of code and that it is worth stepping away from the problem you are trying to solve to get a clear bigger picture and find a simpler solution. The final version of the game crashed at the end of the talk, that is what happens when you test in production. 😅
It was a fun talk, with not a lot of information, but a good message.
Fluttium, an end user testing tool for the real world
Fluttium is one of those tools I am looking forward to trying in a personal project, but I haven’t had the time to do it yet. It looks easy to use, clear, and extremely expandable. What amazes me, even more, is that it is maintained by only one person who is fully committed to open-source. This deserves more visibility.
Flutter for Apple TV. Step by step
Aleksandr was tasked with adding support for Apple TV for a Flutter app. The platform is not officially supported and if you are asking why the Flutter team does not just add it because you think tvOS is just a special version of iOS, then this talk is for you. There is much more than just adapting iOS support to tvOS. Aleksandr had to update the Flutter Engine.
I liked this talk because, similarly to “A Year of Headaches: How not to build a realtime multiplayer game”, it shows both the problems the authors had and the process they followed to find a solution.
Building a large-scale Flutter mobile banking application with 25 Flutter Devs
by Mateusz Wojtczak and Albert Wolszon
Getting more than a few developers working on the same codebase but in different teams is not an easy task. How do you ensure consistency in code quality? How do you structure the project? This was not a talk about the theory, but rather the approaches that worked for the authors and why.
I had a chat with one of the team members after the talk. We are facing similar challenges in my organization and it was nice to be able to compare how we faced them.
Flutter tips and tricks
Just a series of short tips you can apply daily when you work on a Flutter project. I am glad the slides and a repository are already available online because I forgot to take notes during the talk. 😅
Healthy Code: A guide to Flutter App audit
by Daria Orlova
Code audits are not usual discussion points in a software development team. In this talk, Daria explains what a code audit is and how to perform one. It is an interesting talk, not only for Flutter developers, because it gives an idea of what you should do when you inherit an unknown codebase, or when you want to investigate why your team or your app is not performing as you would like to.
Stop Treating Accessibility as an Afterthought: Concrete Steps to Build Inclusive Apps
You should plan accessibility in your app from the very start. Doing it later is like not caring for some of your users. In this talk, Manuela goes through some of Flutter’s features about accessibility, giving very clear examples.
Humpday Q&A/AMA
The Q&A session with members and former members of the Flutter and the Firebase teams was a delight. Mostly because now that Eric Seidel left Google, he is not representing the company when he talks in public, so he is free to express all his opinions.
That’s it for this week.
If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.
Have a bug-free week,
- Michele Volpato
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