Damian Bast's Linkedin Analytics

Thats a wrap - thanks to all who joined us for yesterdays Flutter Meetup in Hamburg and a special thanks to Christoph Schroeder for hosting us! I like the talks just as much as the "hall track" - the discussions and ideas floating around after the official part is over. Shoutout to Grisha (Grigori) Hlopkov and René Schramowski who did all the planning and preparation for the meetup 🎉 If you are thinking about giving a talk, please reach out to one of the three of us, we are always looking for speakers :) - the next meetup will probably be in about three months.

Last year during black Friday I picked up two powerbanks with 100 Watt PD output and it has been a total game changer when it comes to working from cafes, hotel lobbies or sitting outside in the garden. They are only having 86 Watt hours which is a bit more than my internal battery which only has 69 Wh so I almost double my autonomy time (which is already pretty great, but especially during video calls the battery drains much faster than I'd like). With them being below 100Wh I can easily take them with me on the plane, I was even taking 2 of them through security without a problem. What are your favourite "on the go" hacks? PS: Hotel lobbies often have a nice combination of "quiet" while also having a waiter who takes your coffee orders (thats compared to most cafes, which are often loud and where you need to leave your stuff unattended when ever you need a refill).

This is what it looks like when a little known/ used package gets adopted as a downstream dependency of popular package. I've been somewhat hesitant about adopting hive_ce - the fork that emerged after hive had not received any updates in a very long time. I wasn't sure if the new maintainers had the rigour it takes to build and maintain a database solution. (sidenote: thats why I'm only using sqlite backed solutions going forward, as it is relatively easy to swap out one wrapper for another if it ever gets deprecated, but sqlite is tested through and through) But now it looks like hive_ce was adopted as the new storage solution for hydrated_bloc by Felix Angelov - I like this package for small apps where I need "some" persistence but don't really have the need for a "proper" database and don't want to deal with shared prefs. I'm really excited about this for one reason: if there are any problems with hive_ce, they will probably come out now, because it receives a lot more usage and that should expose any problems with the "basic" interface 🙃 So I'll be watching the issue trackers on both projects for the next couple of weeks :) 🤞 Whats your take on projects which have been forked? Do you trust the new maintainers, or does that usually make you switch?

I‘m currently moving out of my apartment and I came across some old sketches for a Flutter Fundamentals App The idea is to teach all widgets included in the framework, grouped by topic and with a direct link to the source and the docs. Bonus idea was learning about breaking changes and using the supermemo algorithm to review the content as flashcards. I believe that I have at least 3 maybe 4 versions of this app which I finished to about 80% mvp and then got sidetracked. Do you have some app ideas you keep iterating upon without ever releasing them publicly? I find that each time I start a new iteration I get much closer to „done“

Kennst du schon den WidgetsAcademy Flutter Podcast? Da gibt es technische deep dives auf deutsch - auf Spotify, Apple und überall wo es Podcasts gibt. Hier eine kurze Übersicht der Episoden bisher: Julian Bissekkou - Flutter Architecture Sparring: Julian gibt tiefe Einblicke in State Management, Flutter Architektur und Testing. Nino Handler: App Architektur eines Startups: Nino teilt seine Erfahrungen als CTO eines der ersten bekannteren Flutter Projekte (uRyde) in Deutschland. Thomas Burkhart: Architecture und State Management Deepdive: Thomas, der Autor von GetIt, spricht über seine Packages WatchIt und das Command Pattern. Pascal Welsch: Pascal, GDE für Flutter und Dart, fokussiert sich auf Testing und diskutiert was eine App an Architektur wirklich braucht. Anton Borries: Anton spricht über Material Theming, Dependency Injection und sein beliebtes Package home_widget. Malte Peters: Malte erklärt den Wechsel von Feature auf Domain First Architektur basierend auf seinen Erfahrungen aus über 30 Projekten. Bendix Behn: Bendix gibt Einblicke in seine von CLEAN Architecture inspirierte Struktur für die Arbeit mit vielen Entwicklern und häufig wechselnden Projekten. Tobias Kietzmann: Tobias stellt seine Feature Based Architecture mit Riverpod und einem separaten Core Package vor.

I'm currently building a small restaurant finder in Serverpod and needed an easy way to control both my Flutter commands and the Serverpod server. For my Flutter apps I have a simple Makefile and I decided to change things up a bit and create a Makefile in the project root to make it easier for me to treat the different pieces as "one project". A couple of days I was told that "taskfile" is the new Makefile, but for convenience sake I decided to stick to my trusty old template :) What do you use for your projects? P.S.: This is a prerelease personal project, so the "reset" command will need to be refactored once the first release is live :)

For the longest time I drew my app sketches & wireframes on paper, now I found that working with an e paper tablet is even more enjoyable. Similar to 🎯 Enzo Conty I had been looking into good ways to prototype app ideas on paper - for quite some time I just used my Moleskine paper notebook and was very happy with it. But I ended up having so many notebooks which I didn't have access to when I was travelling or just "in the office" so that I started to look into alternatives. I have a long standing curiosity for all devices that can run Flutter and when a friend suggested the Boox Palma to me, I saw that they also have an "A4 sized" tablet with pen input and decided to give it a try. Having both the Boox Note Max (which you can see in the photo) and the Palma 2, I can say that the big tablet is mostly useful for writing or drawing sketches, while the smaller Palma 2 can even render videos in a decent frame rate. It's wild how far e-ink displays have come in the last couple of years! But back to my "new" workflow: 1) I start with a page writing down my thoughts, ideas, references without any structure, just to get them out of my system and onto "paper". 2) on the second page I start with a list of "pages" I think I will need in the final app and describe what they will be doing with a sentence or two. Then I add a "number" for reference. 3) For each "number" I create a new page, draw a wireframe and describe in more detail what will be going on there. 4) I start taking inventory of the data structures / "SQL Tables" I will need. 5) And on an on :-) As the hand written sketch is automatically saved/exported as pdf to my google drive, I always have access to it when I'm at my computer and want to start coding. This is one of the key benefits over the "paper" method, I also like the simplicity of just having PDFs. Next I will start feeding these PDFs through some AI tools to translate my handwriting and diagrams and then feed them to an LLM to see if that input can be used to create a prototype / fill some boilerplate code I provide. Whats your favourite way of sketching a new app? Do you do the "high fidelity" stuff on Figma? Are you paper based? Or just plain markdown?

How to call nullable methods without if statements: I'm currently building a bunch of small widgets to collect some data from the user and also allow the user to edit it. Some methods like `onSelectionChanged` are (currently) nullable, but I don't really want to add checks like if(widget.onSelectionChanged != null) - what I like to do instead is use the "call" method on the function. Whats interesting about Dart as a language is that everything is of type 'Object', thats true both for "classes" as well as "functions". Both classes and functions can be called - function objects always have a "call" method with the same signature as the function they are declared as. Classes can (optionally) implement the "call" method which makes them "callable" as in using a class as a function. Happy hacking :)

The Flutter log tool has severe memory loss. After a couple hundreds (maybe thousand) lines of logs it starts forgetting what it saw. Thats I I like to write my logs to logfiles which I can then search and filter at my own convenience (also I have vim for that ;) ) Here is a simple one line command you can use to read the (available) logs of a specific android app - just replace the app identifier with your own: adb shell ps | grep de.proelium.myapp | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I{} adb logcat --pid={} > log.txt The > log.txt overrides any existing log.txt, so be careful with that. If you need to append use >> instead or create a new file for each run.

Softwareentwicklung macht gerade die Agrarrevolution durch - lasst uns doch mal über den Elefanten im Raum sprechen. Vor nicht all zu langer Zeit war ein großer Teil der arbeitenden Bevölkerung in der Landwirtschaft tätig. Heute sind es in Deutschland noch ~2% Ganz so extrem wird es in unserer Branche vermutlich nicht, denn anders als bei Lebensmitteln gibt es keine natürliche Grenze für den Bedarf von Softwareprodukten. Meine Kaminfeuer Analogie ist diese: Ein Landarbeiter ohne Ahnung von der Fruchtfolge wird mit einem Traktor zwar ein paar Saisons gute Ernten mit minimalem Aufwand erreichen, dann aber ist der Boden ausgelaugt und es wird richtig schwierig noch etwas zum wachsen zu bekommen. Ein Softwareentwickler, der die "Grundlagen" nicht richtig gelernt hat, wird mit KI für eine paar Iterationen erstaunliches Bewerkstelligen können, ein MVP alleine gebaut, Investoren mit Velocity überzeugt. Doch dann kommt ein Problem, dass nicht gut in den Trainingsdaten abgebildet war, das System fängt an zu halluzinieren und die Bugs sind unauffindbar. Ein Bauer der sein Handwerk versteht kann mit einem Traktor ein vielfaches der Arbeit schaffen, aber es ist und bleibt ein delikates Handwerk und der erste Traktor steuerte sich nicht von allein. Ja, das Programmieren in 5 Jahren wird vielleicht so anders sein wie der Sprung von Assembler zu Hochsprachen. Aber wer damals Assembler konnte, war auch in den Hochsprachen meist gut unterwegs und hat Probleme die von Speicherleaks o.ä. verursacht wurden "verstanden" und nicht nur gewusst was man dann "anders machen muss". Ich freu mich auf die Revolution und bin gespannt wie wir in Zukunft Software schreiben werden. Wie siehst du das? Werden wir alle "obsolet" durch KI, oder ändert sich vor allem unsere Arbeitsweise?

Did you know that your Flutter App can also host a (web) server? Breakpoints are nice and all, but sometimes you want to get a more direct view into your app at runtime. Wether you want to host some devtools, run a website for sharing data in the local network or you are just interested in pushing the limits - adding an http server to your Flutter app can power all of this :D For my talk at the Fullstack Flutter conference '24 I created a Flutter App which served its UI via http so you could "remotely" interact with the app and even send touch gestures. What are you using http servers in your app for?

Did you know that you can attach to your device console to check the logs of your production (Flutter) app? It's great if you have a production that "only occurs in production" and you need to figure out whats going on. For Android there is adb logcat, which is super convenient - for iOS you can go to Window -> Devices and then select your device and see the output. Usually you disable all the log outputs when building a release, but you can always create a "staging" build which has all log output enabled (just make sure it never gets released into the wild). I've used this a couple of times to catch bugs which I could not reproduce on my machine. Its also great to see what the plugins you are using announce to the world :) - or if they throw an error internally. What are your tips for finding bugs that only happen in production?

How do you handle the "version" of your app when building releases? Over the years I have used many different approaches: - updating the pubspec.yaml for each release and auto determine the next possible buildnumber on the stores - creating a named tag which is then used to determine the build name and or number - overriding the sourcecode and just handling versioning in the pipeline or the codemagic gui - manually setting all these parameters on a local build (never did that, but was on a project once where we didn't have CI 🤷‍♂️) ... and many more. Not sure which I like best - but the screenshot comes pretty close :D - it's just the "simplest" way to do it for (very) small projects. Whats your take on release names and versions?

If you are ever travelling and want to continue working on your Flutter app while you are offline, you might have a hard time. By default the Flutter cli tries to update the dependencies each time you run the app. To avoid this you can pass --no-pub to your flutter run command. (If you are using an IDE you will need to add it to the run config). Side note: If you want to create a new Flutter app while offline you can use flutter create --offline This works with all packages you have in your pub dev cache - so you can use everything you have previously used while being online. Do you have any tips for developing while being offline?

Don't try to be the 10x developer. Strive to be the 1x dev instead. A couple of years ago there was this myth about the 10x developer who can do everything is faster and knows more than all his peers. Most people where overlooking the absolute basics and the meme of "startups deploying wordpress to kubernetes" was born. People obsessed about frameworks or state management solutions or which cloud platform is scaling best. But most developers never read and learn the basics. The stuff that makes a developer go from zero to one. Like 'Effective Dart', Software design patterns or `Crafting Interpreters`. With AI technology everybody's current skill level can be 10x'ed - so a developer who previously was a '1x' developer suddenly knows about all the frameworks and can tap into all the tactical knowledge there is. And the '1x' developer is able to apply this 'tactical' knowledge because he or she knows the concepts behind it. The 'why'. A developer just starting out is maybe a 0.1x dev and with proper use of AI, a junior developer can pull of things today that was only possible with years of experience. But the spread is getting bigger and bigger - so know your basics if you want to prevail in an AI driven world where software development is drastically changing. On the one hand it seems like its much faster to lern through AI, and to some extent that is true. On the other hand I can't recommend it enough to read books written by subject matter experts who spend hundreds if no thousands of hours to distill their knowledge and lessons learned into a digestible form. Are you in the camp "pro basics" or do you believe AI will do all the coding for us in no time?

Hey lovely Flutter people, the next Flutter Hamburg Meetup is right around the corner. If you don't already have plans for this Thursday (February 20th), why not join our meetup at Elea.ai with amazing talks by Florian Vögtle and Reza Taghizadeh. If you haven'r RSVPed already this is your call to do it now :) https://lnkd.in/e3aqpA_4