News
Google's Flutter, the Freelance Gig that Boomed 320%
Although this article describes the Flutter market for just a single country (Australia), it's hard to escape the feeling that Flutter is continuing to gain traction world-wide.
But there was one job on the platform that saw demand outstrip every other job: people who were experts in Flutter
If there was ever any doubt that Flutter is a serious tool for cross-platform app development, news like this should help lay such doubts to rest. I see this as encouraging Flutter development further as more companies jump on the Flutter bandwagon.
Tutorials
Porting Processing to Flutter
Matt Carroll of the SuperDeclarative YouTube channel is undertaking the ambitious project of porting Processing to Flutter.
Just what is Processing, you ask? The processing.org website offers this quick intro:
Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping.
Kudos to Matt for taking on this project. As ambitious as it is, if he's successful, it could provide a gentle introduction to the world of Flutter development for a new, younger generation of aspiring artists, designers, and developers.
Tips & Tricks
App Bar Deep Dive
Have you ever found yourself wanting to build a custom app bar for your Flutter app, but couldn't figure out how to do it with the "standard" set of widgets?
YouTuber THKP offers this nice walkthrough of building an app with various custom app bar functionality. If you're at all interested in building an app with non-standard app bar behaviors, I think you'll find THKP's tutorial helpful.
Architecture
Learning Backend Development for Flutter Apps
Are you just starting a new Flutter project and wonder where you should start with the server side of your app?
I found this Reddit thread interesting in terms of the variety of approaches recommended. Answers range from good ol' PHP/MySQL to Node/MongoDB, to a lot of other technologies as well.
For me, this choice really boils down to what is going to work best for your specific project, in terms of both the technologies involved, and maybe even more importantly, the current knowledge of your dev team. In other words, I don't believe we'll be seeing a one-size-fits-all solution to handing off JSON to the Flutter client anytime soon. :-)
Dart and the Performance Benefits of Sound Types
Dart Engineering Lead Vijay Menon has a great write-up here on some of the benefits we get from the type system in Dart, some of which I hadn't really considered.
In practice, soundness allows our compilers to generate smaller and faster code, particularly in an ahead-of-time (AOT) setting, where we ship precompiled native code to clients.
If you're interested in a deep-dive on why these things matter, be sure to check this out!
// From Mark
The Flutter Jobs Keep Coming!
We start today's issue with news from Australia that available Flutter jobs are continuing to grow (see below).
As a developer, I'm keenly aware that an investment of my time in learning something new can have an uneven payoff from one tech specialty to the next, so this news is reassuring. It helps me feel even more certain that time invested in learning and growing my own competence with Flutter is time well spent.
Here's hoping for even more growth in Flutter career opportunities as 2021 unfolds!
Mark Winters