My First Three Months With Flutter
August 2020, I decided for the thousandth time to get serious with learning how to code, I had heard about flutter previously and the first thing that came to my mind was its baby tech so I never really considered it But after failing multiple times with other languages I convinced my self to pick up the "baby tech".
I decided to read up on the tool and do a real extensive research about flutter, read a couple of blogposts about cross platform application and their performance compared to natively developed applications, and what I saw really made me want to try out flutter and so I downloaded the SDKs and Android studio. I also decided to get a course on flutter to speed up my progress, went on linkedin.com and twitter to try to connect with other flutter developers.
During my first month, I ran into loads of problems with flutter and a simple google search mostly brings out a solution, not bad for a baby tech right. I found the concepts stateful and stateless widgets very confusing, so I spoke to a couple people on linkedin about it and most of them just advised not to sweat it and just continue with the course which I did. I was very happy with how easy it was to set up an app screen though.
My Second month with flutter, I learnt more about routing and navigation, So I was advised to stop following the course and to try to start up a project without following any step by step tutorial, I designed a food delivery application and integrated it with firebase, It wasn't the most beautiful application but I enjoyed every minute of frustration and challenge the project put me through.
After working on the food delivery application to a point I stopped and got a task to start working on a CBT application which would be connected to an external REST API,I am currently on it and enjoying every bit of this new challenge. I hope to go back and complete the course because I have a feeling some of the problems I am facing with state management is because I did not complete the course.
I decided to write about my progress mainly to document my progress and also to give tips to other people that are planning to jump on flutter. Choosing flutter will give you a number of advantages which you can lookup yourself.
A FEW TIPS FOR PEOPLE PLANNING TO USE FLUTTER IN THE FUTURE
I noticed that a percentage of the problems faced were because i did not read the documentation properly, so please always try to read the documentation you'll make up for time you spent reading the documentation when you start coding because you'll have a clear idea on how to use the widget or API.
Also don't sweat about state management just keep practicing it will all make sense very soon (I still find myself confused about state management at time).
- Start learning flutter as soon as possible this "baby tech" is growing very FAST.
I feel the decision to pick up flutter and just grow with it and it seems to be the best decision I have taken this year. This is my first story on here so please forgive my blunders. I am very much open to advices and mentoring.