The joy of creating in Flutter

I am now officially in love with Flutter. What started as a crush has turned into something palpable. For the past 2 weeks, I have been heavily invested in learning Flutter from App Brewery’s bootcamp-style course. If there’s one takeaway from the course, it is this: Flutter+Dart is a lethal combination. I have now come to truly appreciate the ‘promised’ language for frontend and the frontend itself.

I must confess, though. I did not hold the same feelings for Flutter in the beginning. At a couple of meetups, I have called Flutter all sorts of blasphemous things — difficult to learn, highly inconsistent, and a confused approach — all without closely working with it. I, however, assure you that Flutter is none of the above. On the contrary:

• its composition-over-inheritance approach makes it easy for beginners,
• its Widget-oriented design makes it consistent, and
• Dart’s succinct and familiar (JavaScript-like) syntax makes things less confusing

The App Brewery course I mentioned before has been an eye-opener. The course itself is pretty long and exhaustive, but rewarding. Since it’s geared toward absolute beginner programmers, I was able to go through it at 1.5x playback speed and even skipped a few sections. I am currently at 64%, hoping to complete it by the next weekend.

During this time, I customized my VS Code quite a bit to my liking (this post’s featured image), so much so that creating Flutter apps in Code is a far more pleasant experience as compared to officially recommended Android Studio. This, of course, is made possible by the awesome Flutter team who does not want to tie developers to Google’s ecosystem.

If you are curious about the source code of the app seen in this post’s featured image, here’s the GitHub link. It’s an app called BMI Calculator that I created as part of the course. Go ahead and explore my commit history to see how easy Flutter makes creating beautiful-looking mobile apps.