Hello Flutter World!

Hello, Flutter world! If you’re reading my blog, you probably have an interest or, at the very least, some curiosity about Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop. Whether you’re a hardcore Flutternista or someone just mildly curious about Flutter, welcome. I hope you find something interesting or useful in my posts that broadens your knowledge or understanding of Flutter.

I was first introduced to Flutter in the spring of 2018. At that time, I was working at an engineering services company building Android and iOS mobile apps using React Native. I had prior experience building native Android and iOS apps using Java and Swift, respectively. I was intrigued by the cross-platform from a single code base capabilities of React Native. What I didn’t like about using React Native was JavaScript’s loose data typing, aggressive type coercion, and scoping. Additionally, the development tools, development environment, documentation, and community support was sporadic, often deficient, and generally lacking.

While attending a meeting on React Native debugging techniques, a colleague mentioned attending Google I/O 2018 and learning about Flutter. He was extremely impressed by the presentations on Flutter by the Google Flutter team and explained the differences between React Native and Flutter. Both frameworks have the same objective of creating cross-platform apps from a single code base but use dramatically different approaches to solving the problem. While intrigued, I wasn’t at a place where I was open to considering yet another new development platform.

Then, in the summer of 2018, I was in a position to take an in-depth look at Flutter. I was initially hesitant and more than a little skeptical about taking on yet another new development framework. Still, as I read, experimented, and learned more about Flutter and Dart, I was continually impressed and delighted with what I found. I was hooked on (would it be too melodramatic to say “in love with”?) Flutter. From my first welcome to Flutter app to my first released Flutter app for Android and iOS on Google Play and the Apple App Store, I found Flutter to be exciting and even fun to use for my projects. Everything about Flutter, Dart, and the programming ecosystem surrounding Flutter from the documentation, code labs, and programming community all were significantly better than my experiences using other solutions. And the Google Flutter and Dart development teams continue to improve and get better with each passing day.

So, why did I start this blog? My journey into the world of Flutter has taken me to many different places to learn from a lot of great people; Didier Boelens, Andrea Bizzotto, Coding With Joe, Jeff Delaney, the Flutter Development Team, and so many other talented people. I’m inspired by the Flutter community to add my voice to the choir to sing the praises of Flutter and share my insights. I hope that I too can add to the Flutter / Dart conversation while inspiring and helping others to find their own love and possibly greatness with this new framework.