Hi guys! It’s Andrew and I’m back to my channel. You haven’t heard from me for a
while but there is a reason for this. So, let me give you a bit context about this and
then I will talk about the future of this channel. As you may know, I’m a Java Developer, I
started my career as an Android Developer, been working on this position for a few years,
switched to Kotlin. During this time I gained ton of experience in a team of highly
skilled developers. Then I decided to try web development, because I was always curios
about different aspects of development, you know front-end, backend, mobile
develpment, I wanted to try everything. For the next few years I was focused on
web development, especially in React. Well, React is great, it’s very flexible, fast
especially in combination with Redux or MobX state management solutions. I was happy with React, but
then I heard about the React Native and I decided to try it - why not. So the connection point
was the fact that as a mobile developer, I know the specifics of this filed and I now know the web
development with usage of react, so basically that was natural for me to try such kind of framework
for mobile development. And I built few commercial projects using React Native and unfortunately I
was not impressed. At that period React Native had a lot of breaking changes and overcoming such kind
of issues was pretty time consuming. Another thing is that React Native uses JavaScript bridge to
communicate with native modules and that was just not a good as it suppose to be in my opinion. The
same thing is about documentation, deployment, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery,
even some of the core features like router felt like a crutch. But this was my experience
with React Native, I know a lot of developers who in love with this framework, they like the fact
that is uses Javascript, they don’t care about some shortcomings of this framework and they
just love it. But that was clearly not my case. In 2018 I heard about this new thing called
flutter.. for the first time. This is the cross-platform development framework
and it uses Dart language which is new for me as well. And I was really
excited to try it. ANd there was not that much information about even simple
topics, so I started from official tutorials, example apps, I watched everything, learned every
tutorial that I could find. And I loved it. From that time I switched to flutter development,
I went all in. I was really exited. But, ya there were few challenges I had
to overcome in order to start flutter development. For example, Flutter uses
Dart language for building interfaces. I haven’t heard about the Dart for
a while. The last time it was like 2011 when Google presented Dart as a replacement
for javascript in web development, but it didn’t happened for some reason. So, Dart appeared to be
very familiar for me. Dart is an object-oriented, It has C-style syntax. It Influenced by modern
languages like Java, JavaScript, Kotlin. Flutter Stateless and Stateful widgets are similar
to React components and stuff like that. So, a lot of concepts were familiar for me. But you know the
old saying, which is that if you only know Delphi, then when you learn new language, you will write
Delphi like code. And this is 100% true. So, in order to write Dart-like code, I had to adapt to
it and start to think in Dart when I was working on Flutter apps. And that required some efforts,
but I’m happy that I had switched to Flutter. So the main reason I sticked to flutter is not
only the fact that I can build cross-platform apps really fast. for Android, iOS and now for
Web. It’s also the fact that for me Flutter is the most productive and easiest tool to build
whatever I want, despite the complexity of design and business requirements. Well,
of course it has some limitations, flaws and bugs, but I feel that its growing
faster than others, I see the future in this tool and I’m satisfied with a quality of my
work. And I think it’s the most important . So, guys on this channel I’m planning
to share my knowledge, the things that I have learned so far, some kind of best practices in Flutter development and cool features
that Flutter brings to the market. I’m really exited about the content I’m going to
share with you and I appreciate any feedback from you, likes, comments, suggestions - anything
that can help me to be bring more value. So, that’s pretty much it for this
video, see you in the next one. By!
