News
Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Flutter Engage
If you haven't yet dived into the details from Flutter Engage, this video should provide you with a good start.
Here, Tim Sneath gives a high level overview of the most significant announcements from the conference, allowing you to pick and choose the sub-categories you find most interesting. Highly recommended if you're just trying to figure out where to start as you dive more deeply into the announcements from Engage.
Announcing Flutter 2
One of the most significant announcements from Flutter Engage is Flutter 2, which boasts some major advancements in the kinds of environments in which Flutter is now supported:
With Flutter 2, you can use the same codebase to ship native apps to five operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; as well as web experiences targeting browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge. Flutter can even be embedded in cars, TVs, and smart home appliances, providing the most pervasive and portable experience for an ambient computing world.
Read on for all of the details!
Dart 2.12: Sound Null Safety and Dart FFI in Stable Channel
Another big announcement from Flutter Engage is this one surrounding null safety in Dart. It's been a long time coming, but it's now available in the stable channel. Dart FFI, which allows you to call existing C code from Dart, is also available in the stable channel.
If you'd like to dive more into the details of this announcement (and if you still need to migrate your code to Null Safety, you really should take that dive!), Michael Thomsen has you covered.
Tutorials
A Visual Recap of Flutter Engage
If you'd like to see a great visual recap of Flutter Engage, Microsoft's Nitya Narasimhan has boiled it all down to a single image, in a very creative way.
Hint: Be sure to follow the link to the large image if you want to examine this in detail.
Very nicely done!
Development Process
How Avocode Improved Development Process 10x with Shape Up
I know I just highlighted another story related to Shape Up last issue, but here's yet another story of a dev shop improving their development metrics using this process. I highlight this again because often the process by which we develop a product has a far greater impact on what we deliver than does a specific dev tool.
This story goes into much more detail about how Shape Up affected their own internal processes than that last article did (including knowing when to stop, avoiding feature creep, and more), so if you're at all interested in this, be sure to check this one out.
Flutter Jobs
Amazon Front-End Engineering Position with AWS Amplify | Amazon.jobs
It's pretty cool to see Amazon prioritizing their AWS Amplify job openings like this, which speaks to the growing popularity of Flutter. It's also nice to see alternatives to Firestore starting to gain some traction, if for no other reason than to give developers more than one choice for a backend architecture.
If you have the skills and would consider working on the AWS Amplify team, this is definitely worth checking out.
// From Mark
Flutter Engage!
Wow, what a week for Flutter!
I don't know about you, but I still haven't made it through all of the Flutter Engage sessions which dropped this week. They included all sorts of exciting announcements, many of which I'll mention below.
It just goes to prove what a dynamic and promising technology Flutter is, and makes me glad I've chosen to invest my own "learning time" in this great toolset!
Mark Winters