Rody Davis and Frederik Schweiger speak as part of an online webinar for making money with Flutter as a service.
0:00 · thank you everybody for signing up today this is made possible thanks to code magic Thank You Marie and Martin both in the chat we are excited about taking on this subject as flutters of service and I thought like who better to do it with and Frederick so this is going to be a quite fun yeah it’s gonna be pretty
0:22 · interesting to say the least we have some really exciting topics plan so just like a general overview of what we’re going to be doing today and going over we have we’re gonna talk about our backgrounds first to kind of get some credibility for those that doubt and then we’re gonna have we’re gonna start with Frederick’s talk we’ll have a short Q&A after that and then we’ll jump into my talk we’ll have another Q&A and then for those that are around we’ll have some drawing and prizes for those that are asking good questions so both me and
0:52 · Frederick have have some special stuff to give away I will be giving out some promo codes of the widget studio for both Android iOS and Mac OS and I think Frederick don’t you have some stuff too yeah I will have I will also send out basically I think Marie will send out some emails after this event to everyone who attended and they will also contain some kind of promo codes and other maybe smaller gifts so yeah stay tuned it’s kind of a surprise yeah yeah yeah I
1:23 · think it’s really good for everyone who’s attending and yeah lazy to recording right yeah exactly all right so so Frederick can you tell me a little bit about yourself yeah sure first of all things also from my side and thanks for having me yeah my name is Frederick I’ve been six
1:49 · six years do something like what while I was attending high school I got into mobile development and then had my first job also developing Android apps basically after I finished University I was employed for exactly half a year or something and then I realized I become a fluttered freelancer and probably was one of the first in Germany in the European area with that yeah and
2:15 · then since then I just what self-employed basically building a flutter it’s yeah awesome really enjoy it so yeah so what I guess we can just go ahead and jump into it but so like well what are you gonna be talking about and then whenever it whenever you’re ready you can definitely go ahead and start and you go ahead and give you controls as well yeah maybe yeah we just have like a short overview
2:41 · I think yeah the topic I’m going to cover is building products your users actually one I think that’s kind of a broad topic it could mean for those who’ve been around for some time maybe you follow the discussion and yeah it’s
3:03 · more covering the whole area of building side projects many profitable profitable side projects and maybe turning them later into their own into your own business having something like solo founded or founded with two people like an indie business something I think this is like the bigger picture for today so
3:24 · yeah that’s that’s my kind of talk and I just try to explain it a little bit just give you some hints I mean I also just started out I’ve been on a few smaller projects myself like also side projects and then small startups which then at some point failed some were successful with like small things and I just try to put in some insights that I have gained
3:46 · and also please don’t take them that serious because it’s just like my my only based on my own experience I think everyone has to make their own you know but if you can get yeah it would be great right okay yeah yeah cool maybe row do you want to already say something what yeah I’ll give a quick snippet and
4:08 · then cuz it’s gonna be related to yours but then you can go ahead and start yours just so so what I’m going to be talking about in mind is basically a follow up to kind of flutters of service in general whereas yours is a case study I want to be like be able to like mirror a lot of that kind of stuff I want to show like examples on how can take an idea or a future idea and be
4:28 · able to monetize and create money in the future I want to show everyone that like how many you know options are possible and some things that you may not think about when creating applications and like you know if you’re someone who is a UI designer for example like oh you can make money too and I can show you ways that you no matter your skill set where you can find your niche and fit right in so yeah but I’m really looking forward to giving more about wire - nice
4:57 · ok then I would say I would just I just it’s just an invitation that popped up that some people are in the waiting room I just yeah you should see admit the only one person can be the host so ok should I admit all of them that 3x yeah you can you can you can click it admit all and mutes by default so ok until until you share with me again ok ok let
5:28 · me just share my screen see you and make sure to check the chat too because you can um show a portion of it - yeah because currently I’m just I think I’m just sharing my doors all right you got it ok so everyone should just see the big slide right right thumbs up yep see you’re good good nice cool yes
5:54 · as I already said my talk for today this called building products your users actually want or yeah what I learned while building why - I own for those who don’t know what Wireless IO currently is it’s like a feedback tool for flutter reps and interactive feedback to flutter reps where your users can give in that
6:17 · feedback without leaving the app and basically it just captures your screen has like a very not very but like kind of fancy you write with so it’s hopefully it’s fun for the user as well to engage with the developers or with
6:32 · with the team behind there and then give you productive feedback on how to improve yeah so that’s what we’re issues but first of all I want to again emphasize this is my disclaimer everything I’m telling right now if you follow this advice and whatever your house catches fire or something it’s not my responsibility it’s just like for entertainment purposes and for you too many you know
7:00 · get some more insights from someone who did something similar right okay so you’re probably here because you’re interested in starting a business or starting a side project in the flutter space right so everything here usually it starts with an idea like every business idea whatever however I don’t really like the word
7:24 · idea here because it doesn’t really resonate with me I always have to think about those big Silicon Valley kind of startups which have like a lot of money and funding as well and that’s actually what I don’t want to target in this talk especially like target for developers or solopreneurs people just want to get out there idea because there was also when I
7:47 · was attending university they were and I was younger I had like also an Android sticker on my laptop as I said I was an Android developer break them and then also two students approached me to Business Economics students and saying yeah we have like the biggest idea right and we want to share with you that’s always like this kind of high gear that will change the world and they said you have to sign an NDA and stuff in order to know the ideas said okay as some
8:13 · experiences there was a gap signing there just let me know what it is they’re like we’re going to go to the group owning it and as you might know component games they were like a huge deal they then Groupon was huge and they were probably in there at the market like four years right and Google offered them I think a few million make sure you get the whole product and they did kinda know those guys they they just saw they can copy the idea and and the end I
8:37 · should just get like 10% of shares for basically building the whole text second building their app rain which was not a good offer so what I’d like to you to do here is nothing of an idea but think of kind of a pain point right the pain point that you as a developer or or maybe even an entrepreneur or as someone in everyday life experiences yeah
9:02 · because if you were having this kind of problem at least one person yeah actually has this problem and that’s already a huge plus because then you’re you’re kind of solving a real-world problem so that’s also already a check mark they’re also the probability of other others having the same problem that is kind of high because there are a lot of other developers around here basically everyone probably in this meeting and if
9:28 · you have a specific problem regarding flutter that’s very likely that if you share it with others they would really appreciate it or maybe even pay money for it if you would save them some time right and since flutter is kind of neat as well yeah there’s still a big you
9:45 · know piece of the cake untouched and so that’s why we’re actually having this webinar right now and I think rody will also elaborate on that further so I want to make a short discretion here and you know talk to you about how to make 1 million this is not like some kind of con series I want to you know make your CFD traders and let’s join the whatsapp group no it’s not it’s just like showing
10:11 · you actually what you would need to do in order to make 1 million revenue in a year so it’s basically five thousand people buying a two hundred dollar product for 1,000 people 1k product and so on right so basically you would just
10:27 · need ten people paying you 20 pane and you would have like a 1 million 50 people paying 20k and you would have 1 million dollar revenue right the thing is we’re talking about software here and usually in the software as a service space it’s fine you know it’s quite usual to to have sell something like subscriptions so if we turn the page around and have a look at systems in prices it would just take 5,000 people who subscribe for 17 dollars a
10:59 · month to actually make 1 million revenue I mean take those please go on and take this numbers with a grain of salt here because there’s like all happy day cases when we’re thinking about those people being subscribed for a year right in order to hit this million and then you have to probably also pay taxes and stuff so the whole mini an idea is kind of just to change your mindset right or to line your mindset and yeah in the end you could also just have let’s say 500 people paying 107 60 $70 per month to
11:32 · also make this million or ten people a day whatever and that’s actually not too far away from b2b prices right if you if you actually delivering a high quality service that’s very niche for a company that saves a lot of money well you know they’re using your service or in the end you can also just have one person Y in your startup so Martin if you’re in this call and you’re listening to this please make sure to stay in its call so we can discuss the details you know the quiet
12:02 · but you know whatever also a very interesting fact here is that there are two million active cutter developers right now probably even more at this very moment and that would mean you only need 0.0025 percent who would actually
12:20 · subscribe to your product again for a year right to make this 1 million and even if you would say double this number and say this 0.05 percent it’s still not very high so coming back to the pain point I was talking about was I usually
12:38 · this is something that my users don’t want I don’t know about you but I’m a developer I like playing around with new kind of type stuff so you know i when i finished uni i just still things that i enjoyed you know building would you lead no one else would pay any of any cent
12:54 · for like where using control level an app or something or I once build an app which you could stick them to the Nylund my sister’s night lamp and if you would go to sleep like a mosquito sound would start to play and if you would like turn on the lights to search for the mosquito which is stopped right I mean this is the those are things that that are fun but usually if you have this kind of market market groups you market for let’s say underaged people like you know
13:23 · buying this mosquito noise or sound net usually they also don’t have that much money to pay for you hurry up so you want to target other developers or especially I included in the b2b market in which we are right now so the idea behind I’m building something that my users don’t really want was user
13:46 · feedback tool that doesn’t suck so that was the idea I came up for myself and so yeah I just went out and basically build the prototype for it and on the 25th October 2009 you can see the Treaty here and I just put it out I just want to check how is the resonance and what people like it or not and I actually got a really positive feedback and from from
14:12 · the community as you can see it’s like nearly four hundred four hundred likes and one hundred retweets and even tim smith from from clutter from the PM pro flutter at Google right he replied when I said that he’s loving it so I mean what kind of verification
14:27 · can you get like if it’s not the product measure of the product itself saying that it’s actually quite good so yeah I think I found my niche and I also verified we are here and I got in touch with the committee so that was actually pretty great and I got kind of excited a little bit overexcited so I started building the first MVP I don’t know if
14:48 · everyone knows what an MVP is sends usually for a Minimum Viable Product and that’s a product that just offers enough features that people would actually start using it right and that that you can try out the idea behind it and that it just works that it barely works there’s no like fancy features around maybe not even the sophisticate design so yeah I went out and started
15:12 · building it came up with this I don’t know some people still remember it it was called snap feed it wasn’t even called a wire - thank them and as you can see it was kind of super euphoric because as you can see everyone who wanted to implement it a thousand of the projects so you had this beautiful project chooser because you would have thousands of maps obviously and yeah
15:36 · this was basically the 2d detailed view of the whole product so if someone sent the feedback it would come into into the into the yet do this list and then you can see the date you can set the status if it was new plan the progress closer was basically like you know yeah planning solution yeah right internal to focus customer management and yeah back
16:03 · then I actually put out a landing page what you always read on on the Internet and I collected email addresses and I actually had quite a lot of email addresses but actual users of this app have been like 15 to 20 only 15 to 20 years it’s and all those 50 to 20 years is no one really needed the status no
16:22 · one needed like the sorting functionality no one used the owner which it could assign so you could even invite people to your project but no one would use it so all the stuff was actually not really used by those people but this doesn’t stop here I got so excited building my empathy that I even added this beautiful setting screen with all the integrations you could even like choose a branding upload the logo one and change the phone remotely obviously right so you didn’t have to do it on the client side you could change it remotely and even integrate edit integrations
16:53 · email slack and for sure test magic coming soon and secure so not many people were actually using slack back then although this is like right off my best feature and only one person you see here and that was me in my example project in order to set up the Xavier API so yeah
17:15 · that was me being done building the MVP which I call the maximum viable product because it was basically a full-blown product already and not something very simple that I could just test and throw into the market right so please if I learned something don’t build a maximum buy a good product and also don’t spend more than this initial
17:39 · phase right and also please please go ahead and talk to your users that’s actually a very very important thing which I will also liberate later on this talk the next step for me in this in the
17:54 · whole journey was actually to rebuild the whole MVP with all the feedback I got from the community again here you know sometimes my developer and OCD kicks them you know I just have to rewrite the code I think we all know that so you wrote write some code and it’s actually not as great as you thought like half a year later right I’m one of those guys yeah
18:22 · please don’t do that don’t don’t ever rewrite your whole project after you got a product which actually works so however the good thing about snappy was that I was building the whole sniffing SDK and the public so as you can see that it was public and open source project on on github and you can see
18:43 · like some open issues some closed issues they’re not bad many because it wasn’t actually used by so many people but as you can see they’re already like a lot of interesting features right there was a question how to handle localization as an example someone wanted to cut some strings someone what wanted to support like more theming or more customization options so all of those feature requests they had nothing to do with the front and then I was building right so even continuing that having a different channel this is basically my email my inbox for wire - and there’s
19:16 · only a few of the things that that reach me over a few different channels and as you can see you here people are super eager to actually give you feedback if they if you build something that like easier so if you’ve come up with a problem that you think is is a good good
19:34 · idea to be solved then just go out and try it out and people will reach out to you and they will come up with cool ideas you would never thought of that you wants to integrate into this platform right so I came and I took all those ideas and which I collected over all the different the different
19:53 · platforms and channels and then I put them onto a yet Trello board and I came up with some yeah smaller ideas and and put some my tears in the backlog and stuff like that the usual way you do when you doing like to start right so I can’t collected them here and then I started working on them so what I’ve learned from this phase was actually it’s super important always get in touch with the users and then trying to only build requested features or features that are requested by someone from the community also which thing that I
20:26 · learned I think a very important and essential part is ask for help and also help others so that’s that’s one of the most important things you can do if you if you start building your own business is get in touch with your community as early as possible try to solve really solve someone’s problem because then it’s not your problem because it’s the form of two people already and this is how it grows again again you want to get this inside swirl rain and then again
20:55 · please don’t rewrite your entire code base so in the end Wireless was born and as some of you may know this is how it currently looks this is this is the website how it looks today and this is a picture of the current console and the interesting thing about the console here is that it looks completely different than the console on snap bean and that’s
21:20 · actually because I just build the features committee retrogressive because if you can see this year this is like a github kind of search I would have never built this if no one asked me to write so I build this because it was an issue on github action and then someone asked for having labels to organize the stuff because labels are when sophisticated than just having those predefined statuses and that you can set but nobody used because do you want to search their own like create their own workflow and they don’t want to adapt your workflow and then there’s a close
21:53 · button way you can just close today if it’s done so it’s not shown on the on the initial page load and then you have an options button we can actually delete stuff there was also a request I got from from a small start-up in Europe and because in order to be compliant with GTR they also hinted me and said okay we have to be able to actually delete feedback and even if you’re not from Europe or if you from from like us or Africa or wherever you don’t have to deal with GPRS at first class citizen
22:22 · right you get this feedback and you want to support it and that’s what your users actually tell you and even going on on integrations and members if you have a quick look at you at the new member section and that’s also something that completely changed although you didn’t see the old member section of snappy but there’s something that changed because people wanted to have different roles like administrator’s attitudes viewers I just build up because people asked with you and then also the possibility to edit or remove members with those kind of rules also the feature that you can remove yourself also having something
22:55 · like pending invites that you can revoke invites that you accidentally sent to the wrong email stuff like that you can do now and that’s just like because someone because of this feature so again we drone them start small and let your users guide you always get to know your users and please keep iterating and ship
23:15 · features this is also something that I learned be Hardware the hard way because people always say you have to ship you have to ship you have to ship it sounds so silly but it’s actually true because also what I’ve learned about entrepreneurship the hard way is everyone talks about an exciting way if you see healing must beg you launching SpaceX Rockets you know - Tamar’s whatever right all the kind of stuff it looks so exciting but it’s actually not that exciting in everyday life it’s still like a tough job to do it it’s it’s a decision you have to have every day and that’s why I asked me to just
23:47 · keep iterating on small features so you can ship something then you get feedback from users again and that motivates you a lot when I build the feature like the github search feature and and then the labels I did this like in one in one thing right and one more flow the problem there was while doing doing this big search and doing this kind of like complicated or big feature labels I had to deal with so
24:15 · many things that I took me like three or four weeks or something nearly until I basically shipped a new feature until I get a new feedback from my customers regarding those features and it’s also like kind of demotivating if you don’t get updates or if you don’t share stuff or if you don’t have any visible progress so please go on and ship small features and then ask to use what do they think you can improve all the stuff the next thing I would want to shortly talk about is actually doing things that don’t scale and I think I’ve stolen that from a lot of other people or already
24:47 · like doing building startups and and so on just my experience here it’s super important or valuable if you if you do things like sending out stickers to people Rodya look love letter that is this on the way currently to the USA right and yeah just send out stickers
25:09 · start with something like that say thank you to those people that actually supported you try to get in contact with them right and for that I’m saying put yourself out there go on Twitter it’s a huge community it’s it’s a nice community you can learn so much from so
25:26 · many talented people like I can learn from roadie like it can learn from I don’t know like a lot of talented people out there they’re way more talented in a lot of areas than I am if you just go out there and talk to them and ask them what you can do better they most likely will help you if you’re if you’re asking a nice way then for sure print stickers and send letters right I mean you can
25:48 · discuss that kind of thing but also very important is yeah building relationships that you’re actively it can be taking part in and what we do right now like webinars asking people for help maybe even write writing long emails there was one timed putting
26:05 · two clients I wrote like two or three denied four-page long emails back and forth and they were so excited about the product because they’re the clients loving it so much and this is actually what you want you want to being in touch with your first ten users and who everything what they want because if you do that if you saw those ten problems you’re solving probably a lot of problems more like many many more people will like likely use you as your product and then there’s one thing I just wanted to mention on the side like before you know I wrap up the whole thing is also
26:38 · go on an automate and what we discussed before I actually started this talk there are so many already tools out there like code magic as a CI rank it can make your life so much easier it’s already been there you don’t have to prove yourself especially if you start your solo business that you can build your own CI why would you it just takes take your time if there’s like a tool for automating I don’t know like getting user feedback right and then maybe use that one because in the end it’s just like you just trade your time or Y and
27:10 · the end your money for a product and if you think about if I would build a feature or something or a service that would actually help me like a customer relations tool or a CI tool or something if you think about how much work you can get done on your own product or on your own project if you think about how much it would cost you like let’s say 50 years or 100 bucks a month and if this feature would take you ten hours to implement then probably those ten hours or like even 20 hours for something right you could use this time your time
27:43 · is probably more valuable than those one hard of 50 bucks right a month so if you’re like thinking that way it most of the time makes sense to especially in the early stage use cloud providers use third-party services just get your thing out there and that’s yeah basically it already that was my short like intro on what I can tell you if you have any questions or specific questions feel free to ask now I would have to check actually and
28:12 · arrange the the whole shet thing here there’s a lot of questions made but yeah that that was it for now from my side and I think I’m going to switch it over back to roadie so you can maybe handle people who want to join and I just saw on certain questions is already sounds good ok cool so let me check how can how can
28:49 · I make you actually the host again roadie ah I think you should be the host no all right thank you okay hear me yes
29:06 · cool well thank you so much yeah that was a that was a really exciting take on wire - like I’ve been you know I’ve been following you know this Snapseed and stuff like that it’s been it’s been interesting to see it like evolve and kind of like grow into like you’re
29:23 · finding your audience you’re reacting you’re evolving and it’s just like that cycle you just keep you keep cycling it up because like you’re never gonna be like in a perfect state you’re not gonna have ever arrived with wire - and so I think it’s really cool to to see the journey and also like a tangible journey for people to see like it’s not so like cut and dry it’s not like okay if I do this this this and this then I’m gonna have a perfect product and then just now I get money from here on out it’s like it’s a it’s all about the vision and the
29:52 · the the passion that takes you know as an entrepreneur we’re also like you know supporting an application and releasing it so we had some pretty interesting questions in the chat so first of all what is your take on like flutter web like how do you feel as if for maybe either using it as a you know something
30:12 · for this product or just in general flutter web for applications because I think originally it wasn’t snap see like view yeah yeah yeah actually stem feed was you and also the current console is building to be honest just because of
30:29 · the reason that when I actually tried it out a month or two or three months ago you have to think about that right when I started implementing this stuff flutter web still have some kind of issues with actually you know selecting text and all that kind of stuff what I thought is kind of interesting if you just want to copy the contents of a feedback or share stuff or copy an ID because I don’t know if you know you can also send user IDs or emails and stuff
30:58 · right or touch some info to white-ish and then you can basically assign this or see what kind of user basically is sound what kind of feedback and to make this just better handleable right or yeah I don’t know yeah yeah I
31:17 · decided to actually go with who also because there’s like a lot of images for sure and the image performance was not that great when I actually tried it out right I mean it gets better and better yes I mean maybe if I would start now
31:33 · maybe I’m gonna do it if I’m surely targeting web though that’s the thing is like like I feel like if you’re targeting multiple platforms across platform first that’s a way different question than if you’re only building web application and functions as a service and ever since it goes around there like that actually the SDK is
31:55 · written in Dart right so you could basically write so it may would make some sense for sure but also the fact that the navigator is not that great yet right with sending and sharing Lee playing with this hashtag and since you can basically invite people as well I mean they’re workarounds so you can make your basically write web service acting the URL and then doing the redirects and stuff like that so you can hack it but I thought for for a sophisticated platform was good to go yeah and they’re also
32:28 · like great CSS frameworks out there that’s better support and supporting you doing a good UI especially for dashboards and stuff of course yeah and that’s the thing is you’re leveraging what’s available which is kind of a maybe a predecessor to what
32:46 · we’re gonna be talking about later or a foreshadowing but you know it’s like you know this is where the developers can step in you know flutter web is a new platform like you may think it’s not ready but this is also where you can come and say okay here’s a need in the market let me find a way to provide for that market so just an example of just a
33:05 · real-world example if you know there’s flutter web there’s many things needed right now on the web in regards to you know dashboards for different kind of charting libraries you need layout libraries for things like you know something as simple as like layout grids and stuff that people are used to on the web things like templates like you know
33:23 · something as simple as like a wordpress template but the same kind of idea for flutter web applications you want to have like this kind of theming that goes beyond material for some applications or just pre-built kind of things so this is all places that developers can step in and be like okay I’m gonna actually offer this because it’s not gonna be there until we create it sure and I think that there could be I think you
33:47 · you’re also liberating on this in your talk right but I mean I think when we were when we met in New York we said in this co-working coffee and I think within 10 minutes that’s actually a good
34:04 · idea and this is definitely a market for this in the future so in the end it’s just up to the people to see what actually also is a bit of fun for them to implement and also like a pain point because I think especially what I can’t emphasize it enough it’s a it’s a tough road right if you start start building
34:22 · something yourself it’s going to be you will you know will have like dip or something low and you just like no one’s going to use that I always have I’ll have that all the time right or you think okay this is why it is you just can’t give user feedback is this like so good you know and then I need someone from outside Emma’s so cool like when I show it to my
34:42 · clients they’re always like they can’t grasp you know because it’s like so crazy when it like makes the app small that stuff and then those are the moments but you’re like sure like yeah that’s really cool and and actually making someone else happy or making their life easier is also a big part at least for me to to build something so don’t underestimate that that you should always you know go with small steps and
35:04 · rollout stuff and just keep going yeah I also don’t believe in the overnight like kind of success right so it’s oh it doesn’t exist yeah yeah yeah it’s a lot of work behind the scenes literally all the time right yeah well and also we had a good question to check the chat how are you finding maintaining your sdk like what
35:26 · kind of issues have you ran into not specifically but like how are you dealing with like maintaining this as a small team / one person yeah actually n so that’s a really good that’s a really good question because I think they’re also like to people who really helped me a lot and with wire - recently it was Dominic and Nash from from the community because I actually started the whole thing by myself but as you can imagine building an sdk then building a back-end
35:53 · and building it from then as one person is kind of tough that sometimes right and you just move slower than you might want to write so actually I just delivered the whole SDK upfront and then I just basically asked two people those
36:10 · two people to help me and they did a really great job until now right and chrony I’m also looking forward to actually rewrite some parts of of the SDK to make it more sophisticated again because some people told me things that aren’t currently possible although I already tried to to make work in in most scenarios but yeah I’m just trying to
36:34 · build the stuff in the public there as well so if you’re on github make it open source sometimes you people are so so interested in your project even if it’s like open source but you know yes it’s like a paper I mean there’s a feed free plan as well feel free to go and check it’s free for developers and it will always will be but even then there are people who are excited because they really like this idea and and how it
37:02 · works and it actually does the job so well so they would even come in their time and help you out with that that’s what I was saying and referring to build your community and you know just be nice to the people and they would be nice to you it’s always like that kind of stuff right and so yeah it’s just like an open-source project I’m working on it if I have time for it or you know then I just hired two freelancers like Dominic
37:28 · and ash to help out at some time at some point to just get out new features yeah I hope I can find more time actually in the future and I I think I will to add some really really cool new features that I that I think are yet worth implementing and adding like details so yeah it’s a lot work wait yeah so as we
37:53 · asked most people what’s your work-life balance like how do you manage like being like entrepreneur but also you know staying productive and being on the never-ending Twitter I think that’s a good question I could ask you because I think you’re
38:10 · you’re pushing out way more that I do I feel like a slow slow torches you know just like very slowly and then you come up with like this widget builder you come up with like thousands new libraries and so that’s actually a good question because sometimes you go on Twitter and you see so many people building so many things and that I also
38:33 · say I just I’m I’m for sometimes I’m just not active on Twitter I just don’t check it at all because you know you just somehow kind of get demotivated right at some point because you’re like I’m still working on this feature for like two weeks and there’s like two guys coming up with like a whole new state for the German solution right that time yeah yeah I don’t know so that’s
38:55 · actually a tough question to ask and I think everyone has to deal with it in their own way all right I have usually tried to do also some sports and don’t put too much myself definitely tried to go the way of also having it as a side project right so I also have another business actually where I’m rebuilding an app right for for some telecom so that’s where I
39:20 · actually make money because I right now I don’t make any one little wire dish because I just want to build it and get it out and get it in people’s hands so we’re sure people though I’m I don’t have that pressure and I think that’s an important part of not burning out too fast right to have this pressure to deliver something because I think also good stuff takes some time especially if you want to involve the community and actually get those ideas and yeah for
39:49 · sure I mean I know for me like I have plenty of things that like I keep busy with outside of development like I also was a musician so it’s like you know music is such a big part of my life I go hiking and I do a lot of VR so it’s like but I also do a lot of procrastination so like yeah I may be really busy but it’s like I’ll wait really long and
40:11 · tilde do it a project and I’ll get it done in like 20 minutes but it’s like it seems impressive but I’m also like mulling it over in the back of my head creating these things and they’re all like kind of forming and then yeah just do it like the implementation is easy part it’s the it’s the edge cases that keep me up at night and I’m most a big procrastinator here so what also helped
40:35 · a lot was actually to not put too much pressure on yourself right that’s what I said well it’s then like I don’t have to ship this like tomorrow right I mean it’s um you have to have some soft deadlines for sure otherwise you never you never sure for sure but you also even artificial ones yes you shouldn’t you shouldn’t like rely on this or there
40:56 · would be the best way not to rely on this every day if your everyday job and you have to succeed because in the end right you know the one who is deciding if the market actually wants this idea or not but if you’re like very niche or very special it’s just your your problem right and then you can storm something and until let’s say you realize that the idea has no potential you should discard everything like weeks right so you have to invest three months four months into actually developing and putting it out and I
41:27 · think this can be kind of tiring as well if you do this like multiple times up region offer each other right so if you fail once everyone’s just said I just keep on iterating and failing but they don’t take into account that it actually also tires your right maybe you can’t have like this high a motivation which I
41:45 · actually have which I am yeah which I would like to have right for new projects and then it’s more like it becomes a strain of I have to do this now and if it becomes turns into this I have to do this the procrastination wants to gets also bigger and you’re like yeah no so Before we jump into my
42:12 · talk I wanted to real quick take a photo of everyone so if you are on the call please go ahead and like you know activate your video let’s all get a screen shot Before we jump in just in case we can see like you know who’s on before we transition because you know people drop off and then while we’re doing that Frederick can answer for me real quick what do you think about firebase is a back-end yeah for everybody I actually
42:37 · think this is a great solution if you’re yeah if you’re building just like a flood maybe yeah flutter old me up I think it depends right if your ends on your you want to let’s say like don’t want to build a back end if you just want to rely on firebase and firebase functions to handle some kind of micro transactions or whatever I think it’s definitely fine but also think about that you somehow lock yourself in a bit although I think the services they are offering are great but if you want to do
43:08 · some more let’s say sophisticated things some it’s a fine like having naoki I mean we’re just running all the time I mean cron jobs all that kind of stuff you can do it up to a specific degree right and but we all know at one point it just gets a bit happy right I think yeah definitely for sure you can always start with firebase when you’re starting out in that because you can always migrate the data right it’s exactly if you structure the layers
43:35 · exactly right so you can always move the day I don’t think it’s that big of a problem and given if you use firebase health education you can even export all the data as well or just keep on using firebase off I actually also use five it off because I think it’s it’s great yeah a good abstraction layer - yeah exactly right and yeah so I think it really depends on your needs if it’s just basically if you’re just using the standard functionality and especially firestore office you’re in I’m great
44:06 · like search then it’s then it’s great but if you need to have like a more sophisticated search right like let’s say something with geo geo stuff like yeah yeah yeah points I mean you can use geo hatches and stuff but they’re like they have the limits right so it’s all about the data yeah I think it depends and then there’s
44:30 · also different different technologies for that right some some things there there’s the real-time database that would make more sense because I think they just bill you for for the transportation storage and the firestore
44:45 · actually counts reads and writes so it’s also different product so you have to think about is it more do I store like a little bit of data so the trends very fair rate would be low and yeah I have a lot of like real times yeah probably go with real-time database instead of the firestore right but if I also got all of GCP - so it’s like you can do whatever you want which by the way there’s plenty of shy people so go ahead and turn your videos for all the introverts as well so okay and we’ll have another Q&A at the
45:24 · end too as well so don’t feel like if you if you need to ask your question again you can alright so I think this is everyone last chance if you want to be making history so go ahead all right let’s see that’s it all right redo it all right we’re gonna count down on ten ten nine eight seven six five four three two
45:50 · one nice thank you everyone okay so yeah sweet yeah I just it’s good to get a kind of a good vibe Before we jump her in because um usually the people at the n are everyone that was here so let’s go ahead and I’m gonna go
46:09 · into mind but um so I just wanted to kind of reiterate like a transition to be what I’ll be talking about so whereas yours was more of a case study mine is gonna be more talking about like you know kind of examples on how to approach these situations because I know that it can be really daunting especially as a junior developer when you’re like trying to make your place in the developer community it can be kind of scary to be like okay well these are the things I’m good at these are the things I want to do and sometimes they don’t overlap and also like oh I’m good at building apps
46:42 · but I don’t know where to build them you know it’s like it’s like you know I remember when I was first starting like I was like oh great I can’t build an app but I don’t know who to build it for you know it was like that you know you can do something on dribble or you can do something whatever it’s like then it’s just like taking that too like okay well how do I actually make money on this how do I take this from a hobby to a full-time job how do I change careers you know there’s the whole like transitionary period that you face as a junior developer or even just for an
47:10 · experienced developer changing fields into a new technology so but today we’re gonna be talking about specifically flutter as a service and how to do it in regards to you know making money you know full-time so I’m gonna go ahead and start my presentation I’m sorry for the people that will not be able to be admitted at the time so let’s go ahead and do this and I will answer that question at the end let’s go ahead and jump in you share my screen
47:50 · okay all right can you see my screen Fredrik yes okay cool all right and thanks again to everyone joining this is really exciting this is kind of a topic I’ve wanted to talk about for a while but you know you kind
48:07 · of got away from flutter to kind of become more popular he had to like a catch-22 but yeah I’m really excited because there’s a lot of things that I’ve been implementing on my own and things that you can as well and I know Fredrik has that it’s an untapped market
48:23 · and we were just dipping our toes in and there’s a lot of room for everyone so as you saw like in Frederick’s talk about how how much it takes to get a million like I mean that is just right on the nail and a lot of people don’t realize that you don’t have to have well yeah if you’re only doing ads you need a millions of people but if you are willing to you know do paid upfront or subscription or anything like that you can easily like you know make it with
48:49 · just like maybe less than 3,000 people I think when I build my Tesla app even though it wasn’t approved for iOS when I was waiting for like some of the numbers I was targeting that I could have like only need to sell like I think it was like 1500 subscriptions and then I would
49:06 · have been able to do it as my full-time like only doing that one application but then I had like 12 other applications so that’s like you know my approach has always been like having multiple apps that you’re working on so that they all can help each other so like you one will inspire the other one and then one will also help lift the other one because some apps are paid up front some are ad summer subscription some are free and they all like kind of promote each other in our complementary so some will have dry seasons and you know yeah it’s just
49:37 · a approach I take so yeah we’ll talk about footer as a service by developers for developers so yeah like as Frederick said there’s over two million flower developers it’s an exponential growth and these are active flutter developers a lot are out in China a lot of them are here in the US and it’s rapidly growing and cool too about this is there’s a lot of new developers and you may be wondering like isn’t that a problem but it actually is a pretty nice thing in
50:08 · disguise because what’s cool about there the great turnover or not this is a turnover but there’s a lot of new developers every year is new developers and developers in general are lazy so like you know when you’re first starting you have the least amount of knowledge and when you’re an expert you have the most amount amount of knowledge and the least like you know wanting to actually do it so you you have these two groups of people that you can if you have a solution that they can buy a solution
50:35 · that’s off the shelf and plug-and-play you can actually offer this to them and then they can take that on and your that abstraction layer which is really cool because people are willing to pay for things that save time or things that they may not have to do yet this could be as something as simple as on the you know like something like unity for example the marketplace like you as a VR
50:59 · AR developer may be really good at writing the code and doing a bunch of the other stuff but you may be like super slow at building models but so something that I like to do is like you know I don’t have to spend you know ten hours learning how to build leaves on a tree and how did like shade bark and do
51:16 · all this stuff and then I have to think about all the other bazillion assets I have to add into the scene you you take that abstraction be like okay well I’m going to buy this bottle I’m going to just implement and that you could take the same approach for applications where you can build you know forms for business applications where they can be used in a nice way you can have layers
51:36 · of authentication protocols that they can just plug and say I want to offer Google Apple and Twitter and then kind of similar to like the firebase off you life and vice familiar but you can you provide one level abstraction higher so let’s go ahead and just jump right in so first of all the market is quite large there is whoops there we go the market is quite large you have a bunch of cross-platform devs looking to save time multi-platform is a
52:08 · you know just say sorry let me hide this real quick you know you multi flat you have multi platform issues because you have you have to deal with you know iOS Android Windows Linux web and all these things that are all happening at the same time if you have a bug on one you’re gonna have to have to like figure out how to solve which platforms are facing what like you have Play services you have iOS SDK is you have web SDKs
52:38 · and you have to you have to write all that code it’s a lot platform code but it’s a great place to step in as an independent developer there’s things like web deployment you know when you when you have built your application like how do you release it into the wild and this is a great place where a lot of tools especially code
52:55 · magic is a great tool that’s popped up and you know been targeting just flutter and be able to and many other platforms for that matter but you know be able to say that okay we’ll we have web and desktop and mobile and so you can just use this and then we’ll take care of all the hard stuff for you you know so a lot of developers like don’t have Apple devices and this is a great place where you can step in and be like okay we’ll handle the iOS signing but this goes so much further so there’s things like sparkle it’s open source framework that allows you to release your applications
53:22 · on the open web but then you have auto updating features to where you can get notified when it update is available look and install in the background this is a framework that’s used by vs code and slack and any other tool that says like an update is available with that like very generic message that’s actually using the sparkle framework which is really cool and then you also got things like application application assets so just as before with unity flutter has many assets that can be used you have app icons you have screenshots you have landing screens you have so
53:56 · many other host of like widgets that go with the application that go so much more like beyond like just the application itself so you have things like deeming we have material theming and flutter and Cupertino but you could build like that your own custom theme libraries you know you really target your your
54:18 · specific product your brand and like you can do something as simple as like on WordPress does this we can have a wordpress theme and then you install it and then all of a sudden you have your own look and feel that makes it feel personal and of course you can do this from trail design but you can also do this with just generic widgets as well and I think this is a really cool place where people can step in if you are a UI developer and you’re great at designs but you’re really suck at like releasing applications this is a great place for use happen because you can build all the
54:46 · UI component libraries you want and not have to worry about the logic and then you know the same thing goes for if you’re a person that just likes doing backends and oh just love backends and I hate UI there’s always a market for you too because you can be building these SDKs and command-line tools you can build scaffolding libraries and you can build there’s so much that goes with the application process that you can step in and have a market for and as with any
55:12 · does you know you’re gonna be juggling all these different platforms at once so it’s like you have to choose what it’s important to you and how you can step in so what are the current market needs well it is niche I display at this time
55:28 · but I don’t know if you can call 2 million developers a niche it’s a niche when compared to you know probably the total developer market but it’s rapidly growing and it’s I know flutters already past react native which is huge but there there is a market right now and you know we have things like developer tools anything that’s relating to
55:48 · complementing the application process you have things such as CI CD platforms such as code magic you have templating engines which is like which needs to exist but there’s a couple different ones that have kind of popped up I don’t think any of them really stuck or like have gotten super popular training resources or things like if you wanted to create a udemy course or YouTube or video training series this is a great place if you’re great at training people
56:14 · on how to do stuff this is a wonderful place where you can step in as a developer to be able to train the new developers coming in and you could charge for it I mean you can charge anywhere from you know ten bucks all the way up to you know hundred dollars or more for a course and you make that money every time that a new developer comes on so I think this is a great place for content anywhere anything
56:36 · relating to dynamic content so if you have a back-end in front-end sdk where you can you know manage like showing new updated information something like a dynamically generated you know widget that is running from a back-end service you know just something simple where someone has a need they want to be able to update their app without having to send a new update to the app store you can fulfill that need and then things like I mentioned earlier premium widgets so this goes for anything like paid
57:06 · charting libraries or paid templates that you know have built-in login screens and signup screens or something that I really like doing is like startup templates so you can say okay what is the minimal Viable flauta project that gets any login flow a you know going to
57:24 · the home screen and having a settings pop-up that I can change the dark mode and it seems so simple but they’re like there’s such a big need for it and there’s not a lot of people that are making it right now so the more that you can build that and then release it and sell it this will help people to and of course there’s always going to be free content like don’t get me wrong free is very important but you can also
57:47 · make the distinction between having free content and paid content and be able to upsell on things that target businesses so whereas you know the developers that you’re working with you know may not always be your market you can have it open sourced or whatever but you also want to add like premium templates so like a team like you know if slack all of a sudden decided tomorrow they wanted to use flutter then you would have to you would want to be able to have a solution that said like okay here’s our
58:11 · different widgets and then you can buy them and you know it’s this kind of a transactional marketplace that you you don’t have to worry about who’s using them you know very permissible licensing and you know you get the idea and the biggest thing here is to your developer helping other developers because at the end you guys both succeed there’s gonna be things that you’re developing that other developers need whereas like you know Fredrik for example may have like a
58:38 · supporting library like wire - that really helps my applications but I could have something that could really help his applications and because we’re not having to both build the same things we both can focus on our own things and then also help each other in the end so I wanted to go over some like example applications of things that I’ve done tools that have approached and some kind of successes that I’ve experienced so far so flutter storyboard was one of my very first developer tools I built for developers like from the day one I wanted to I I started with iOS so I was
59:10 · very much you know using storyboard to lay out all my native iOS applications I was really pleased with it and so when I came to flutter that was one of the biggest things I missed so I released the MVP version of storyboard and it is far from finished I have tons of cool updates coming out but it allows you to with just simple wrapping your flutter widget your main app with storyboard it
59:35 · will actually take all of your screens and your routes and lay them out on a canvas that you can see and update all at once so if you wanted to test your login screen beside your home screen beside your detail screen beside your setting screen you can and you can just just like you would hot reload and then all of a sudden you have you can update the change and see it live on all your screen so you don’t have to navigate to the app what’s really cool about this is when it’s combined with flutter desktop you get some really cool stuff because I allow
1:00:06 · you to choose a device frame on the storyboard so you can say oh you can make it like a mock-up like an iPhone or Android iPad and it’ll layout everything for you but what’s neat about that is you can have your desktop resize the
1:00:21 · window however you want zoom out the canvas to how it fits but then you’re developing you know in your IDE and you don’t have to have like be running on a device and flutter desktop is way faster for hot reload and of course there’s things are not going to work you know if there’s an SDK that’s not available on desktop and it is on iOS you’re still gonna have to test on a real device but I think it really gets you really far you also have the ability to yeah set
1:00:45 · dummy data as well as you know just having like various things like screenshots which I know people are using it with and for those that haven’t seen it before this is a storyboard it allows you to have all the frames and one screen really smooth it’s really high performance you could have like a hundred screens on or more and it doesn’t affect it’s only rendering what’s on the actual visible window at any given time you can fully interact
1:01:11 · with every single screen that’s shown and yeah like I said this is the MVP there’s a lot of really cool updates planned and could including you know panning and zooming and a bunch of other stuff with multi-touch gestures on the iPad yeah it’s just a simple you know is an idea probably had and just like a weekend and really wanted to implement so next I want to talk about widget studio and if you haven’t seen already I release widget studio about a week and
1:01:41 · a half ago and it is actually been trending on the iOS Mac OS and iPad OS App Store in the top 25 to the upper tools what’s really cool about this application is it allows you to you know
1:01:57 · develop these multiple widgets all at once but in a standalone kind of a way you you know whereas you know with a flutter editor you’re you know with yes code or something you’re building an application and you’re building a material app with multiple screens and then I wanted to create that abstraction of okay I want to create a login screen I want to create a home screen I want to create a material app and then everything’s a
1:02:21 · widget so then you can copy the individual widget out and then use it wherever you want or you can reference multiple widgets like on the last update which I’ll show after our presentation you can actually reference other widgets on the canvas and it exports everything for you all at once and from day one I built this to export code that you can use in your application today and I know
1:02:46 · Adobe XD and some other tools have come out but they are exporting code that’s really not meant to be used it’s like okay using a bunch of transforms and burnt a bunch of like you know verbose kind of things whereas mine is you know doing it the fluttery way so like you know when you have a scaffold in that bar and a floating action button and a center and a text it’ll do it just like
1:03:09 · you would if you were building a flutter application yourself writing code the nice advantage of that is because I’m building it for developers and I use it myself if any time you used property is like in the constructor it’ll automatically Adam as debug outputs you automatically get it to JSON you know constructor method in your widget and there’s a bunch of other stuff that I’ve added which is like you know a lot of sugar but what’s really cool is you can
1:03:37 · then have the advantage of having a color picker or playing around with widgets I love developing these widgets on like an iPad because I could be on an airplane and you know be laying out these different widgets and really start to like get to know every single widget because it exposes you every single
1:03:56 · property that the widget has at one time I’ve learned so much about the flutter widgets just unlike the past like two weeks even after been using flutter for over two and a half years so for me that’s like wow like I didn’t know that textile had this one property and because of that because it’s exposed out in front and center you can really play around with it and not have to worry about it messing up your project because it’s isolated and it has full undo/redo so then you can just remove anything that you mess up and and of
1:04:23 · course that has drag-and-drop and stuff like that but it’s just an example of me building a tool that is made for developers that can be used in a real world way and another thing to kind of preface this with too is you know there’s many tools like this that need to be made for flutter you know there’s you know anything that’s relating to networking or things that you know
1:04:48 · relate to templates just like I brought up earlier these all these kind of tools need to exist because for developers wanting to save time you can help step in and be like okay I can provide this and then people will use it and not everybody’s gonna use it that’s not the goal you’d like it like we said earlier you only need like zero point zero zero to five percent and because of that you will be very happy with you know the
1:05:14 · kind of adoption you get it’s not about making thousands of people happy millions of people happy it’s just like worrying about maybe a thousand maybe a couple thousand and that’s a whole lot easier to manage when you approach it from that perspective choose your pricing options to where you have a market that’s at a price point that makes sense for you and what you can actually manage and you know things that you want to get up for and be able to do so here’s a quick demo of the
1:05:40 · widget studio where I’m just taking these different elements and I’m dragging them down the canvas and what’s cool is like it it’s very flutter ease so like you know if you have a preferred size widget like an app bar you can’t drop it on to a container like a container child or anything like that you have a full widget tree that you can inspect and edit every single property that the widget has you can then use even since just making this gift I’ve added like 20 more widgets so we’re
1:06:13 · adding ton of widgets every single day and we’re targeting the end of the material catalog very soon but you know it’s just you know it’s just a simple tool that allows you to that solves the need of you know exporting for flutter so as you see here I do two brackets and
1:06:29 · then I say count something very simple but when you go to the export code it’ll automatically give you a constructor option that says count so then when you’re using this widget from other places you have that option that you can then send on so it’s kind of like a almost like a view model in that aspect so there’s also things in regards to application support so I’m working on some applications that help you design icons for your your iPad Mac OS and
1:06:59 · Android applications you know easy like be able to upload and download an icon resize it things on you know that also should exist and that I’ve kind of taken stabs up but if kind of like in the open source level right now but PWA manifest generator privacy policy generator these are two things that like are needed in every application and photo right now but there’s not like a good you know
1:07:23 · tool that’s you know there’s tools that generate it but like being like the owner of that and being like ok I’m gonna do this better than anyone and we do it right and I’m just gonna nail it to where it’s like people like oh yes like I’m gonna go to that tool every time that’s like where you want to be and that’s how you serve the niche and just as a side note just because there’s
1:07:42 · many apps that exist in a market that doesn’t mean that you can’t enter the market if nobody is really serving it well that’s probably the reason why there’s so many competitors or so many tools available for example when not one
1:07:57 · of my very first photo applications which I originally built native was a pitch pipe and when I originally built it there was plenty of pitch pipes on the app store I mean there was at least just in the one category alone there was probably over 100 but I decided to take
1:08:12 · an approach on the pitch pipe that was completely different and made it super clean professional like you know very modern and because of that like mine like reached like it’s now the number one and has been the number one for over a year and much longer than a year but in the last year like nobody’s come close but the purpose of that is because all the other people have just built it
1:08:34 · in a way that didn’t solve what people are actually warning and so when you find and you serve that niche you really can help developers and anyone for that matter really take a problem solve it and then they’ll be your brand champion so other things to real quick you can also build screenshot editors so you know every App Store Google Play and Mac OS Windows Linux all need screenshots
1:08:58 · and it’s something that see really simple but can be a pain in the butt and what’s really cool about flutter and the ability to override your target platform you can actually generate the screenshots without running on an emulator as long as you run it in the specific dimensions you can they’re valid to be exported and then other simple things like a splash screen editor because this is something that’s often forgot about but I know on lower-end devices this could be a real pain so
1:09:26 · here’s just a quick example of me building an icon generator it allows you to you know upload any icon you want and what’s cool is when you download it downloads an archive that you can literally drop directly into your applications so it creates all the folders for you
1:09:43 · in here I’m going to show the individual ones but what’s cool is like you have the icons in the correct format in the correct folder structure and you literally it’s a plug-and-play kind of system and then you as a developer just worry about creating your your one icon what’s cool on the new WBC announced that we can now support SVG icons which is going really great for iOS and Mac OS but still paying the button on web and and Android at the moment and Windows for that matter so some other things
1:10:13 · that I’ve been doing that also need tons more tools built with is CLI tools not every developer love CLI in fact a lot of people that like no code tools H CLI or anybody that’s like a designer usually doesn’t want to do CLI but for developers and back-end developers this is like bread and butter like I’ll choose a CLI any day because I can build
1:10:37 · my own tool around it so things like app scaffolding templates app clones just really easily be able to say like you know whatever generate this and then it just generates it to where you can have it exactly how you need always in the way you need it this can also be just as
1:10:54 · simple as like no angular has this generate system where you can say ìokay generate this component generate this service generate this and once you introduce structure you can go so much faster every single one of my applications follows the same folder structure the same pretty close to the same state management but I have the same structure in every single one of them and because of that I can copy and paste between projects I can jump into any project no matter if it’s like a year ago and know where everything is I’m never confused and it’s because you have that structure and it’s ok if the
1:11:24 · structure of vols but you got to evolve with it so it’s like you know if you do a new practice you got to make sure to implement it in all the places to where it’s consistent when you don’t have consistency that’s when you’re going to really bite yourself later so other things like reducing boilerplate so anytime you have the successive amount of stuff to do a quick example is I took
1:11:43 · I made easy web view which is all the boilerplate for regular web view in just simple tools like that where you’re handling that abstraction layer of doing all this complicated unnecessary stuff but then the developer just gets to have like a cup align implementation that is prefaced with the fact that if they want total control they’re not going to be using anything if a person needs all the fancy
1:12:06 · callbacks and you know whatever they want they’re gonna have to do the regular implementation just as what you’re trying to do your goal where you’re stepping in is for the lazy person that doesn’t want to do all that stuff and just says like I want it like in five minutes be able to build this application and I just need a webview or whatever insert widget here other thing too is
1:12:27 · code generation I think Remy has done a wonderful job with freezed and a bunch of his other packages that relate to code generation where you can say okay here’s a specific need Dart where we needed immutability and json serialization and copy with constructors and stuff like that and you can be like okay well i can build a package and you know a set of tools that will do all this for you another area where you can do is localization I know there’s
1:12:55 · localized e and some other ones have targeted flutter but it allows you to say okay well we have this this problem which is internationalization and flutter applications and we have a solution which is building your your JSON files of your or your AAB files for all your translation files like I said earlier dynamic content and also just a service abstraction of insert whatever service you’re using you can then be the abstraction for the person that’s using it so um another big thing is you got to
1:13:25 · find your market because not every you know market is the best one and a lot of it takes like I know Frederic talked about it a little bit but you know you gotta see what the markets gonna be first you gotta put something out there let it bite and see okay actually that’s
1:13:41 · way different than what I was expecting or oh wow people really love this and that’s the thing I was carrying the least about so it’s like you know it’s a it’s about tailoring your your applications over time and being flexible to say okay well the markets kind of taking this shift I’m gonna see where it takes me and one of the things I’ve learned in my
1:13:59 · life too is being ready for when that wave happens like you don’t need to go buy a surfboard when the wave has already started you want to have the surfboard and be ready way before the wave is you know come to you because one you’re there and ready you get to you get to experience all the joys of being the first mover and having the great
1:14:18 · market of you know being with others but if you’re always playing catch-up like you’re never going to get ahead or it’ll be really really difficult you want to find people that are highly motivated and willing to pay and funny enough developers are one of the people that love and know what it’s worth to pay for applications not every developer but I would say most developers understand that like if an application is $10 or $5
1:14:45 · or even $1 like a developer with would probably not think twice about buying something whereas a person that is not a developer would be like oh I’ll never pay over XML and in fact I buy so many applications just because I want to support the developers regardless if I use them myself we also have you know like I said you want to make sure you evolve over time and then support the new developers coming in this is kind of a unique field where flutter is for better for worse
1:15:16 · targeting cross-platform development in a both complex and super easy way so like you can use flutter and not know about Swift C++ Linux or you know c-sharp or whatever you need or Java even for that matter or Kotlin but and you can only use Dart and then you can build all your applications it’s great but there’s also the developers where as like myself if you know how to write the platform code then you’re in like a
1:15:44 · really good position because you can be building these really custom tailored experiences but because flutter tailors to both you have a lot of new people coming in that’s like this is the probably their first introduction into app development so they’re gonna be only knowing Dart and they’re gonna need some tools they’re gonna step in so maybe you’re just a developer that knows how to write Swift and and Kotlin just a
1:16:06 · simple example well you can then be a contractor for writing plug-ins so if they say okay well we need X Y & Z you can step in and be like oh yeah I’ll build a plugin for whatever your company is needing so you get to build plugins and then they get to just build the applications just another quick example so yeah it’s really exciting stuff and it’s all about being ready for when the market comes and then lastly too we want
1:16:31 · to talk about like pricing options because you want to make it worth your time you don’t want to be like spending all this time developing and creating this stuff to like have like like it all fall on your face because like nobody wants to pay for it or it’s free and then like or like maybe you only have like one user and you know it’s like there’s so many areas in which you just got to be so careful so some things that
1:16:53 · that I kind of take it approach is like there’s there’s a couple different models you can take which is like subscription which i think is really good of course people will have subscription fatigue but it’s about offering it at a price that makes sense to you and your users paid upfront applications are one of my favorite type of applications you there are disadvantages of course as always but for me the trade-offs are really nice so first of all with paid upfront applications at least on iOS and Mac OS is I can I don’t have to deal with the
1:17:25 · in-app purchases which I have many applications and I’ve done it for but all that abstraction is just like okay well if they want it it’s gonna be like you know they’re gonna see the reviews and it’s up to them to whether they get it what’s nice about that is apple offers search ads which is really cool where you can actually price your your application at a certain level you say I want to spend X amount on search ads and you only pay for when the application is installed so you’re not having to pay for general marketing and you can never
1:17:56 · lose money on marketing which i think is a great place for paid up front applications like I said there’s other disadvantages people like Oh what about a free trial and stuff like that and this is where what I approach I’ve been taking recently is offering the web version as the free version I totally believe in the open web I think web has been the best thing that has ever happened for mobile development and I love how powerful you can make
1:18:22 · things on the web flutter is a great example where you can release something on the web and all these native platforms and offer these experiences to where if they want to try and do whatever they want they could do it on the web but if they want like a higher quality experience that’s a you know multi-touch gestures and doing all the like the native offline sync and the high performance rendering and 120fps all that kind of stuff happens on the native applications but you still get to
1:18:48 · offer your product for the people that want like a PWA and to be installed on their home screen for example on the web and they don’t have to be the same experience it can be when I think it’s great when it is flutter uses a skia as an optional flag which makes it really good and performant and actually it’s really hard to tell the difference between native and web but other things
1:19:10 · too is you know you can offer courses on you know for flutter and any other frameworks another nice thing too is support so for example like if Frederick wanted to hire a team to do support he could then target you know really big businesses and be able to charge tons of money for support because businesses are willing to pay for that you don’t even have to be the one supporting them and I think that’s great for even other applications too because it’s something
1:19:39 · that you don’t realize how much people value at big businesses just by having a 24/7 access to a support line they will pay you just paid name the price and they will pay it like they will choose your tool over other ones based on the support and then in tying in with that having teams to be able to just support ok collaboration on your tool and be able to working with other people and just like having the options for you
1:20:05 · know who can pay for what so what are some future ideas that you can do as you know flutter developer general developer or someone just looking in to get into the market well like I said earlier I think app translations are another thing that I don’t think it’s completely served yet I think there’s still room for a really
1:20:25 · good or maybe a couple people to build an app translation service that’s not only easy to use it works way better with flutter something that you could like literally extract stuff and have ability to change on the back end and I know localize II has done a lot of it but I still feel like there’s some more that can be done there database tooling so anything relating to like sequel Lite or the persistence options this is still something that’s an open question realm is really flirting with flutter at the
1:20:53 · moment so it’s a it’s getting close but not quite there yet other dev tools just because flutter releases dev tools doesn’t mean that you can’t release your own there’s been some other examples of people on Twitter that have announced different dev tools that they’ve made or examples and I think that’s really cool a marketplace this is still yet to be made with flutter you know a place that where people can go and and buy these resources just and
1:21:19 · then I just like to say on that one people have built marketplaces but it’s important to take this from a perspective of collaborating with other creators building in a way that the developers and the creators that are creating want to be on this marketplace so whatever whoever builds it it needs
1:21:37 · to be something that people want to use and it’s not like it’s not about like whatever the prettiest tool wins because that’s not the case it’s not about whatever usable tool wins its it’s about whichever tool solves the need the best in a way that helps everyone because it
1:21:57 · may not be the best tool but if it if it solves the purpose really really well doesn’t have a lot of issues with bugs and stuff like that that usually is the one that wins out and then like I said earlier other resources that relates to flutter applications you know whether it’s like I mean something even if you’re just really good at writing a book something I think would be really cool that rest is done is building a dart book you know or a flutter book and just have like a really simple like interactive like from here you know zero to hero you
1:22:25 · know just say like okay here’s how to do this this and this and this and you know stuff like that I think is really good so a conclusion you want to build and develop for other developers anytime you were saving time that is an opportunity cost for someone else that is going to be doing the same thing so that’s where you can step in and be like okay well actually we can save a lot of money if
1:22:49 · we don’t have to do this and I’ll be willing to pay XML so anytime you see that and you’re like wow this took a lot of effort you’re like huh I wonder if I could actually just build this as a package and you know sell it for someone else or give it away but and even if you just as a side note even if you don’t want to charge for anything there’s other options out there you can also do like patreon and have like buy me a coffee and PayPal donation links to where if you there’s plenty of people that just do that and then of course
1:23:17 · having YouTube channels and whatnot so keep that in mind too that you can still do this and still have support but I do believe that you want to make it worth your time regardless of what you’re doing charge when it makes sense just like I said and then also something should remain example it’s not every product that you’re gonna make should become a product it’s sometimes just be better just released as an example and be like okay you know this is great but like you know I think I’m gonna defer to other people like for example like I built a podcast player and it’s like I I’m crazy
1:23:50 · about music applications I build them all the time but you know there’s so many podcast players I don’t want to compete in the market so I just made it open-source and released it for others so just a simple example you know there’s a growing market and new developers keep that in mind because you’re gonna be targeting people that never coded this is the first thing they’re coding with or people that are very experienced and don’t want to do anything at all so build for both those
1:24:16 · audiences serve the underserved if you were finding people that you know are frustrated you know those are great people that would love to find this kind of service if people’s every if everyone’s happy then there’s not really a market for you to have and then like I said earlier support is worth paying for and way more
1:24:35 · than you actually think yeah just look up some of like your favorite your favorite tools and just look how much like support cost for 24/7 it would be pretty surprised like we can be sometimes talking about like triple digit so yeah we’re gonna jump into questions real quick but just wanted to say thank you so much for listening to this I I’ve been working on this for a while I just wanted to you know talk about some of these things that I’ve been going through and experiencing personally and really excited to kind of hear you guys feedback
1:25:06 · you all right so let’s go into the questions yeah first of all Rory I think this was a really dense and interesting we have a few like participants here and I think you dropped so many ideas there should be at least one for everyone and I am I
1:25:36 · can’t emphasize I emphasize more the fact that young people should just bill something that actually fixes the problem or fixes for them and to emphasize the fact that you just need to find like something like this very small
1:25:52 · thing what you was referring to her service or maybe underserved search is like a few well maybe it just thousand one thousand developers right and you could live up that that’s that’s something else and don’t always approach stuff with this you know shoot for well the moon kind of mindset although this is great and I like this as well but you know don’t burn your your fingers right like with those big ideas just start small try to
1:26:20 · get your food into the door with a small idea that you may be charlie to flutter only and then you can evolve out of it like you just you just build a flutter event at some point maybe you see oh there’s meat for it like fellow developer have this neat or maybe even multi-platform developers have this need and then you report it over to react as well and then you grow and then you become at one point like after a few years you become the market leader and this is in my opinion how you grow a sustainable business plan out of like parting with a niche and then having this organic growth and I think even the
1:26:52 · big players very like Google Facebook all of them they started actually very small and never thought that they would be multi-billion companies so yeah I think that’s very very important and a powerful message as well for people no thank you so I’m just gonna jump into some of the questions so I’m sorry I’m not gonna pronounce any of your names I don’t want to get them wrong so we’re gonna go with how do you manage learning new things and prioritize so for me I I’m really
1:27:26 · big on creativity and passion but those inter you know mingle all the time so it’s like one thing that you stay you know keep from burning out two is you stay up on different things that are unrelated to what you’re doing so this means like you know doing stuff in VR and doing stuff outside like coding and music and performing and sports and
1:27:49 · everything that’s unrelated helps you with coding like if you’re only doing coding you’re only gonna be good at coding but if you learn these other ideas then you’re gonna be like oh you know what I actually did think of that from over here and you know creativity is just innovation you know regurgitating different ideas and that you know outputting different ones I’m just gonna kind of do just a quick a couple other ones real quick how many I
1:28:15 · can elaborate on this yeah yeah of course yeah I think it was a quite a long question as well because it was all saying there’s a lot to learn and I end up not doing much Q the procrastination overhead right I think most importantly
1:28:30 · is not to think about doing stuff but just doing you know this is this is a very important thing you know just start with something small if you think about something like I want to build a smart home application right just start with something small start with an app that has it has a button that turns on a light right that does like some kind of memory quest and then from there you will go from there because you will get motivated on the way it don’t over think this is like literally the worst thing you can do that I always do myself if you think too much about a possible solution like even our database schemers
1:29:02 · how you use factory data all that kind of stuff you know be assured you can always change the stuff later on if it gets but just get started don’t let this well if you’re saving and if you’re saving into version control like yeah I know like people they’re always scared it’s like well they never saved and it’s like yeah of course you can’t be able to refactor you know
1:29:26 · sometimes I keep myself like just overthinking we all know this phenomenon where we think about name right which is just like you can rename it at any time if you come up with a better name in some point right so just don’t look with a better name you’re never gonna get to right the first time babies you know just continue a little work with what you have this is a very important thing otherwise you will always like over things stuff yeah and
1:29:52 · the idea of like incremental improvement like you know it doesn’t have to be like a version 1 version 2 version 3 every time like you know it can be very much like okay all I did on this update was just you know choose a new font and but or maybe I just like changed a couple things but you know like I’ve more recently switched the idea just like okay you know what I’m just gonna release things as I add them and stop like trying to be like this wave of pressure of just like okay well 2.0 is
1:30:23 · out and it has this isn’t this in this and now it’s time to jump on because then all you’re doing is creating people that just are waiting for the next version versus like if you’re outputting all the time in which by the way we talked about this before anyone joined or as a couple were but you know this is a great idea for like a Twitter account and when you have a Twitter account for your application you’re allowing you to generate hype over time and you’re destroying the barrier of one version 2
1:30:48 · version 3 version you’re just saying here’s some exciting updates here’s some discussion about it and you get to really connect with your users on an individual level and see like what is actually they’re wanting because if like my choir - is a perfect example you don’t want to build something that nobody wants and you want that feedback you want to be like ok well I really love it and know what everybody else hates it you know that’s not where you want to be and you will be surprised
1:31:19 · that people know that you’re building this they’re also like they don’t care something’s not working you know if they know it’s basically developer you know roadie build this and I I don’t expect some people rodeo that I would expect on the big corporation I would just a project only differently and you really notice that in the community as well so people like yeah you know I just promise but if you can you know check it out in the upcoming days that’s fine it’s not like I fold this but I don’t uses em anymore it’s like how dare ya
1:31:51 · play right you stop working most of the users are like Anya you know this is the shitty app you know I just like uninstall and your gum they will never download it again but if you if you’re building something for a community which you’re a part of and people know that that’s like way they’re way more forgiving and they they like to this is very well I would like to say though like don’t feel nervous like you can
1:32:17 · bill apprehensive but like like don’t feel like you’re being judged in the community by it either like just because you’re creating this like this is not like a oh well Fredrik really sucks at doing this kind of X development and it’s like you know it’s like you know it’s it’s a your product can live outside of yourself as well like you know like your product can be bad and you can still be a good developer you
1:32:40 · I’ve made plenty of bad products it’s like you know it’s like they don’t define you and I would just say like because when I was first starting out with coding and development that was my problem is I took everything way too personally I’d be like oh they hate this like oh this is they just hate my design and so it’s like you know you second-guess everything but yeah I think it’s really important to remember that there is that distinction so when you’re doing this you know you know develop it for the community and for yourself first because if you want to be using it all the times and there’s a chance that the other developers in the same technology do too so I’m gonna also talk about so
1:33:16 · the free trial i talked about my talk but yes you can offer free trials for paid applications you can do this on both Apple and Google Play however I like to have the web version as the free trial because it’s an unlimited free trial they can do it as long as they want and whenever they’re ready to upsell they can just install it my kiss transactions you do it good for interrupting I think there’s actually a really interesting question as well that you might have missed this yeah I think
1:33:50 · it’s actually interesting question so maybe you have yeah yeah I think it’s a huge domain right now currently there’s a couple different players in the space there is a charting library I cannot think of their name at the moment but they they have like oh is it called sink fusion yeah sink fusion charts they offer paid flutter widgets for these really complex like charting kind of stuff I think this is a great place a package that I’m
1:34:15 · working on that is released but like far from like the level of where I want it to be is called data tables there is a great data tables library that exists for the web and there’s nothing like that for footer yet where is like you’re taking like a material design implementation of a data table and you’re adding all the other features like download is Excel searching and reget reject search and be able to have
1:34:37 · column sorting and all the kind stuff be able to step in and be like okay I’m going to provide that best experience you just give me the JSON data or c.coli data and I can handle it from there so that’s another great place premium widgets also a great for anything relating to firebase or AWS or you know
1:34:53 · insert your you know whatever cloud back in here you know you get to provide widgets of like okay here’s a login button the login button does all the abstraction layer for doing you know showing up the pop-up screen showing up this and then all you have to do is a flutter developer as you customize what you say on the button making sure you have the correct files installed and it does everything for you something super
1:35:15 · simple you know if you’re I’m a huge fan of block specifically flutter block and some other state management tools but I built block libraries that allow you to just have a drop-in solution for authentication to where it handles all the logins sign out sign up change email change you know whatever you as a
1:35:32 · developer just make sure you call these specific methods I think this is a great place for premium widgets and it’s a huge market and not everybody’s gonna pay for them if you don’t want to pay for something you’re more than welcome to build it yourself keep in mind the you know the theme of this talk is you are trading off the opportunity cost if you’re saving time that’s where someone is willing to pay not everybody is willing to do that they’re willing to put in the time to build it themselves that’s okay you are targeting the people that just are wanting that convenience
1:36:07 · I want to also related to that I only talk about the micro transactions and the unlock features with in-app purchase and yeah I have an application that’s completely built around you know and I purchases for unlocking stuff and
1:36:26 · subscriptions and stuff like that that’s another place I think the tool needs to step in revenue cat exists but it’s currently a pain in the butt on both on clutter to be able to like both test iOS and Android there iOS is announcing some new SDK is there gonna make it a lot easier but Android and iOS at the moment
1:36:44 · are really hard to test to see like you know making sure the payments went through testing the devices and what it counts but yeah and then yeah the development online compiler I’m online compiler I’ve actually made a ton of progress I’m actually did it rebuilt it in aqueduct which is really cool so you can build run and update any file remotely which is really cool
1:37:11 · do you see any other questions who made target Fredrik you can just call him out if you want me to ask tomorrow maybe yeah what is your current opinion about
1:37:33 · yeah yeah yeah I can talk about it so rephrase that it all depends on the application itself I think widget studio and some of my other applications are great used for flutter web because it’s like very like
1:37:50 · it’s an editor you know it’s a bunch of like components and things you know all clicking and you have the state management and there’s so many like little nuances that like I think flutter does great because you’re not how to do CSS you’re not having to do anything you’re just literally paying to a canvas in handling at all things that aren’t
1:38:07 · great for flutter web and I built my website and flutter web and some other things and recently change them back to Jekyll because it’s not great for start static content or server-side rendering content right now so anytime you have like a post or things that are just like you know dumb websites that have no application state and they’re just literally HTML files yeah flutter web is not the solution it doesn’t mean it won’t be the solution in the future but right now I think anything that’s static
1:38:35 · should probably stay static and honestly hTML is not bad it’s gotten a lot better and with web components and a bunch of other things that have been added recently to the web it makes it pretty easy to do that so yeah yeah for me I’m
1:39:06 · a huge fan of firebase and GCP back in so I make sure to have Google Analytics and all my applications or most applications I track events for a different kind of stuff I can really easily measure like kind of a general Apps vibe on like okay people are using
1:39:22 · this screen way more than I thought or just simple things of like if Anapolis crashing or not I kind of get like a barometer of all my applications to see which ones are you know good what’s the general feedback and I also measure my analytics on Google Play and Appstore for seeing like okay it is like a trending upwards downwards as a scale is nobody buying it so based on that it
1:39:45 · really kind of dictates when I do updates for apps I try to only do an update for an app when it comes down off the bell curve just a little bit because there’s somewhat of like a and this is not for new apps this is for like existing apps but when your app is starting to go down that’s a great place to step up because otherwise few too many updates in a row like you kind of like are competing with your own updates so it’s like you know you may make an update and then like someone like only sees the latest update and doesn’t realize that these X features were in there because you just overshadowed it so giving space to have the updates has
1:40:17 · really helped me so it’s like you know I may only have to update like an ass like three times a year but as long as there’s a really solid updates usually that can be really useful and then it’s also about managing you know like for maybe testing for example I love to use the web for my my beta play
1:40:34 · so it’s like I’ll just change do crazy you eyes and do whatever and then I consider my iOS applications and my Android applications as the stable branch so it’s like it it’ll it’ll update way slower but it’ll have the refined almost no bugs you know stuff like that so I think that’s a really cool distinction to like be crazy on the web be stable on the App Store’s and then you get people that are really solid and want the applications and and the support and the you know just like I never want this to fail but then you also get the people that want to try out all the crazy crazy new features to do
1:41:05 · you have one or two like favorite kind of side projects you’re working on which you give priority to probably maybe it’s like yeah so for me right now I have two projects that are taking the most of my time which is widget studio which is still been trending and top 25 of the App Store so that takes a lot of my attention right now and then also hymns for worship as another app I’ve built which is cool because it’s a globally distributed sheet music and presentation creator so it’s used by over 3,000
1:41:36 · people like almost every day so it’s like very popular and because of that you know there’s a lot of issues that come when you when you have a popular application so support and bugs and things aren’t working so yeah those are the two that probably take the most of my time of the 12 apps that’s awesome I’m just skipping through the questions yeah you mentioned solution what is your
1:42:09 · view on using Dart generally on the backhand side yeah so it’s always my first solution but there are solutions that I think it’s great if honestly if you’re using something like protobufs or anything that’s related to G RPC it doesn’t matter what you’re using on the back end but with that all being said I built backends using C sharp net I built backends using you know just straight-up you know general nodejs or something as
1:42:33 · simple you know I’ve also played around with rust and all these kind of things I think dart is really cool especially with the asterisks of like you know dart compiling to native like dark to native because it allows you to really just submit a by and run it wherever you want I think dart is really great for that a cool thing about aqueducts and the reason I chose it is it allows you to run on multiple isolates so you can have a
1:42:58 · basically however many cores your computer has that’s how many cores the the HTTP server can run on so I think that’s really cool do you think it’s ready for primetime like would you buy it yeah they’re big scale production yeah I definitely would okay
1:43:27 · yeah that’s my current weakness I like documentation slows me down and I know I have to do it and I know it’s important but yeah that’s something that yeah that’s something I struggle with is having the time and writing out the documentation because for me I feel like the second I write the documentation I’m stuck to it because it might might have changed so much but it may be also a
1:43:50 · good thing as well to kind of have some stability but yeah I really like so if you’re building an HTTP server I really like auto generate documentation so things like open API is really cool I know I think it’s called um
1:44:07 · not swashbuckle but uh there’s a there’s some kind of framework where you can use this with opening api standard it’ll generate your api documentation the same goes for flutter applications you can actually generate and annotate your classes to where can actually swagger thank you and you can generate your your
1:44:25 · documentation using dart doc so it can actually you know give you stuff like that but i kind of like to take a different approach to like making youtube videos and blog posts and as well as i like to have it dynamic so things like you know in-app workflows to where it’s targeting specific widget keys that way no matter if i refactor the app it still you know is always up to date because like ii you take a screenshot it’s already outdated you know that’s that’s always a pain yeah
1:44:54 · because it’s very much of a dynamic thing cool yeah maybe I can also add one point to that I for why - I’m currently using issue through press so it’s basically all that exciting writer which is kind of good I mean it’s it’s free and open source you can also go with something like get booked but then it’s already paid from the first second on yeah thing about if you go with something like blue press is that you can just have you read me files right and then maybe basically deploy on on a committee
1:45:23 · or something to notify it just you know push your documentation life and basically also running for free if you’re like having small product so or small documentation so that’s yeah yeah I think another interesting question which I think you more or less already answered it is how would you approach
1:45:44 · server-side rendering on full web for CEO purposes right like I mean I think that’s a very important question especially for like federal replacing web development right because obviously you want search engines to index your site especially if you’re building like a meta search engine or whatever or something where the condom is very important to be in that frame so do you think there will be a solution in the future or what are the current views from your on this hoping and regatta
1:46:17 · flow yeah yeah so there’s a couple different ways I can answer that I will answer it with the first of all the floater team is working on solutions to make your websites more SEO in fact since flutter web is launched it is way better than it was things like generating a virtual semantic tree things like generating virtual site maps and stuff like that so those do exist PWA manifest is really
1:46:43 · helpful for your application you know there’s a lot of things that go around that taking one step further you know optimizing for SEO amp store was a footer application on the web we built that needs to be very SEO dependent so things like your URL routing is really
1:46:59 · important you can actually Simon has done a really good PR to the flutter thing that’s not quite merged yet but it removes the hash so there’s things like just disabling the hash can fix most the issues there but just having URLs that are you know static and changed and have the same content as long as you keep using them Google will pick them up and then start to serve them as well this also
1:47:23 · you know taking it further things that I’ve done in the past to kind of get around some of the limitations is using firebase redirects I can actually redirect to firebase functions that then return static content so then like let’s say I have a blog post for example I can link to that URL and it returns the markdown in HTML form or whatever I want
1:47:45 · and that’s indexable on the web that’s copyable and whatever but you also have a flutter web application so you can build these like kind of a hybrid approach which I think honestly is going to be the first approach yeah I think that’s the biggest thing it’s just like you making these trade-offs but that being said nowadays it’s like there’s a
1:48:09 · lot of people that care about SEO I’m one of them but it’s also apparently not as a big deal as a lot of people are making it out to be like if you’re a small business SEO is really important but if you’re an application your your URL is the important thing so if you can be getting people to go to whatever app that’s way more important than making sure your your blog post three pages down it’s always linked yeah I also totally agree with that it depends on what you use is for for the kind of app
1:48:39 · right if it’s like really like an app that you would run in your browser or you would want to rap yeah then I think it totally makes sense to think about using clutter but if you still want to do something like which you can involves also a lot of text and then all stuff like that then it needs to be indexed I I don’t think that it’s quite ready yet yeah yeah I think yeah so I think
1:49:04 · there’s just like some kind of questions even rolling in so there’s for internet what is your approach to integrate for UI into a big existing code base rewrite from scratch and arm or try to reuse the Oh Jake intrepid and a son of us my talents yes one of the fruits one of the
1:49:24 · first applications I built was a native application on Android and iOS and the first thing I did was rebuilt the flutter UI and communicate through platform channels it works great it has a binary messenger you can do a lot what’s even cool is that confusing Kotlin on Android you can actually use Kotlin native and then call into it with FFI so you can actually take your existing Kotlin code deployed as a module in a library and then import that inside of flutter and then just call into it just like that but for me honestly I don’t know if a
1:49:55 · lot of people know this but if you D compile it into Java you can literally copy most dart objects directly from whatever and convert it to Kotlin and that’s really close to dart so you can yeah there’s some really cool things there where you can you can actually migrate your cloak code really fast and some things that you don’t think about when building on Android is lot of things that’s like very verbose in Java or Kotlin or maybe not calling as much but you can do it and just like half as many lines in dart and then also like
1:50:25 · things are just way easier I think in a lot of cases like with networking you just do HTTP GET and then like it does everything versus like you know having to set up some different stuff but yeah I would say it’s up to you depends on if you’re on a huge team if you’re in a big team then obviously add app is the solution and then you’re gonna migrate slowly otherwise if it’s just yourself then you could probably knock it out in a week I also I also would add that it really depends on how big your code base
1:50:54 · is and what kind of you’re dealing with I can just add from not from like my experience but maybe you know Pascal Pascal she’s also like a flutter Gigi and has been working on like some agency stuff recently and converting exactly existing Android apps into clutter or like bringing iOS and Android apps into the fodder kind of ecosystem and you say
1:51:17 · like for most of the time this experience is wave types of actually rewriting at the flutter then dealing with you know at web and all this stuff that you know comes with it so most of times since flutter also reduces your code too let’s say around 20% or something of what you have in Android and iOS it’s
1:51:39 · most of the time it’s faster to just like it started raw and just try using that and then maybe use the functionality that means hardware components and create a channel for that I think this is still the way to go to be honest yeah yeah what is your approach for project management especially having multiple projects I started using Trello yeah I think yeah you know I still like to use fellow but roadie maybe you want to add something to that what do you use how do you organize your projects so the way I
1:52:15 · archive my brain is I use bear it’s a really cool application that allows you to have one too many notes it’s the meaning that you can have a note that it can exist in multiple folders just by using tags I think it’s really great I store all of my information there for my ideas by I scratch off terrible ideas my things I don’t want to forget and so from there then I generate like MVPs and
1:52:39 · examples which I will do github I like to keep all my project boards I use Trello for some stuff but I actually use the repos themselves to have the individual project boards and I have like one global when I get up so that that way like it’s very scoped not gonna be okay this project this is this state at this time and for me I like to use that for that and then also for me like
1:53:04 · I use github issues so if something’s high-priority like I kind of I use the github mobile app as which is really nice to be able to like keep track of like okay what are the issues that are the the most important right now so that’s not like Anna keep and kind of prioritize stuff but yeah I would say note-taking on bear is one of my secret weapons so nice yeah I also think it
1:53:26 · depends on what kind of team you have to manage behind all the stuff right yeah what other tools you’re you’re using and I mean we recently also started notion problem you know notion as well so you can advise if you’ve dropped notions great and yeah just organize everything inside one singer project basically gets rid of you know Trello and all be all the different channels like ever know whatever you use before so I think it’s just like a personal choice as well and we’re sure yeah best
1:54:00 · to get along with so just how you organize yourself best but I think it’s always great to hear what other people look people are using currently by the way real quick before we move on I just wanted to if you’re in the video call right now please put your email down below with your name and we are going to after the call is finish like send out all but like will draw from the prizes and stuff like that so only people that are on the call itself are eligible for any rewards so just want to thank
1:54:31 · everyone for joining so far but yeah if you’re on the call we’re gonna save the chat so we can do the drawing from there so make sure you just put your your name and email and thank you for registering it was awesome yeah I think there’s one less question which as how how do you handle studying flutter to reach this kind of how do you handle study
1:54:56 · yeah ride the wave I mean you know it’s a I didn’t become an expert day one you know it’s you know joining and you know having to learn all the wrong ways to do something in flutter you know I you know
1:55:15 · you have to be I was always learning I never I wanted to try to come up with a new exciting thing like almost every day or every week and flutter and you know it’s a challenge that you know you’re always outdoing yourself and for me it was also just kind of like discovering you know what I didn’t know and that you
1:55:33 · know okay you know it’s like I jumped into rust like I didn’t know rust I didn’t know how to do FFI I didn’t know how to do web assembly I didn’t know how to do VR and all these things are things I took on because I wanted to learn how to do them and so yeah I would say if
1:55:49 · there’s something you want to learn how to do just do it like you know just like find a way find the resources if you care enough you will fight like you will find the knowledge you will find people that are doing it you’ll find podcasts you’ll find documentation seek it out and you will you’ll be surprised that we can come up with yeah I economy more actually and I also have to say that if what you’ve seen wired Edition stuff and snuffy those are actually my first web from connect so I’ve never written a web project before so I can just agree with that and I think most importantly is
1:56:21 · most important is that you have something to work on that you have some kind of motivation I’m not talking about like deviation it lasts all week or something because I don’t think this exists except if you have like really like like an idea that you want to push out but I think also always understand
1:56:40 · that your you will never be the all-knowing expert you know because if you want we have that never you know try to do new things that learn new things because you will have this kind of feeling of you know being embarrassed to just go out and maybe I have something that is wrong you know you never want to get there it’s just like you always want to go out and and accept that you maybe
1:57:03 · be wrong right and just like go out try out new things and learn new stuff then I think it’s also very important I mean this is a good I think closing thought from the very beginning that we have yeah it was at the beginning we said you always should also try out new things so not only try to become the very like specialized whatever fluttered deaf but also try out look around maybe there’s like even other technologies that are interesting as well right so check out new things and then maybe maybe it’s something else that gets you interested in yes you hope them I think this is the
1:57:34 · only way to go to always you know keep on trying out new stuff and keep this yeah yeah always be a learner cuz I think I think a mistake a lot devs make as they stop learning once they get their first job you know that’s like oh well I learned everything in college to get to this point I learn the algorithms and now I’m good so it’s like yeah you can you can make a career only using one technology I met many people that have but I think if you want to truly excel as a developer and as a human I think
1:58:05 · always learning your entire life will youwill you’ll discover things about yourself he didn’t know we’re possible yeah and except that you’re pulling up the best you start something new I mean you won’t be the best that’s for sure [Laughter]
1:58:32 · there’s so much stuff out there in the internet if you just go ahead let’s go ahead and real quick before we we close up which we’re about to do let’s go ahead and take one more photo so if you want to go ahead and turn on your video we’ll make sure to get that before we leave and thank you so much for everybody putting your emails in the chat like we said earlier if you case you missed it me and Fredrik are gonna be sending out some promo codes for both widget studio and wire - and maybe some
1:59:04 · other interesting things so stay tuned but yeah we just want to thank you so much for you know coming with us today and this Meetup this was a really fun for us I know it was really fun for me and I’m pretty sure Frederic can say the same but you know we were really passionate in the community and we really enjoyed being able to be a part of it and just hopefully you know we can give you a pathway and a story on how you can also build tools for the community specifically yeah I really
1:59:46 · enjoyed it as well I think it was a great evening as well I really liked also listening to your ideas and you of course I mean it was also the first time I you know we didn’t rehearse interaction so it was super interesting and yeah let’s see where this goes and yeah absolutely all right come on all
2:00:09 · you shy people do it just turn it on high you taking the picture now I’m waiting I’m waiting for some of these stragglers there we go come on a couple will provide a photo for you okay right all
2:00:36 · right count down from seven seven six five four three two one so much everyone yeah this was a really really impactful and I’m really glad we got to talk so much and thank you so much for your questions of course as always you know you can you can follow us on Twitter we
2:01:01 · both you know we’ll make sure it’s linked and you’ll see it on stuff but we want to say thanks again to code magic because they you know they’re kind of the reason why this is all possible and make sure to check them out they they’re like one of the only solutions for flutter that are completely targeted to you know allow you know releasing from an independent solution so yeah okay
2:01:27 · yeah and thank you so much and we hope to see you guys soon - thank you so much for joining us have a great night yep have a great night everybody thank you so much bye-bye talk to you soon