Widget Tricks Newsletter #22
Why I like Puro. Debugging using Inspect. Who is Hiring. When not to use MediaQuery. Writers and Write-Nots. The Best Programmer I Know. Shallow Knowledge vs Deep Knowledge and much more.
📝Post of the month:
💡Flutter Tips:
💼 Job To Apply:
Head of Mobile Engineering at Muzz (Remote,London)
As the head of mobile engineering you will work with the iOS and Android native teams on architecture, team ways of working and tackling technical debt. You will work with our manual and automation QA team on ensuring speed and quality of release.
You will join a 3 person engineering leadership team including the CTO and Head of Backend Engineering to tackle cross company company initiatives vital to the company’s success.
Salary Range : £90,000 - £120,000 + equity
Senior Flutter Engineer at ReceiptFlow (Remote)
We are looking for a Senior Flutter Developer to lead the development of our mobile applications. You will work closely with the backend and design teams and play a pivotal role in shaping our users' mobile experience. We are looking for a detail-oriented, team-focused individual who is passionate about developing top-tier mobile applications in the industry.
Salary Range : Negotiable
Senior Flutter Engineer at AJ Bell Group (Bristol/London)
Touch are developing a next generation investment platform. We want to use technology to improve the way consumers access financial advice and manage their investments. The majority of existing platforms are still reliant on software and processes that aren’t capable of supporting today’s technology, so we started from scratch, developing a modern platform that is as efficient as possible.
We're building a mobile first investment app that lets advisers manage their clients' investments entirely through their smartphone.
Salary Range : £55,000 - £80,000
Senior Flutter Engineer at Fullstory (Remote, US)
Contributed to significant enhancements and greenfield opportunities in Fullstory's mobile SDKs, improving data capture capabilities and developer experience. And contribute to improving our Flutter integration's performance and privacy aspects.
Salary Range : NA
✍🏻 Articles to read:
Getting a Flutter Job by Eric Seidel
Two tips I take from this blog to find flutter jobs are…
Focusing one’s efforts on doing things and letting them be publicly visible if possible, rather than making the presentation of such amazing.
Keep a spreadsheet of relevant people you know and when you last talked to them, etc. You don’t have to go that far, but working your network will help.
MediaQuery by Ping's notes
I used to use MediaQuery a lot, but then I started using Flutter's Layout Widgets (Row, Column with Flexible/Expanded) to make my app more responsive. Now I avoid MediaQuery and play around with built-in widgets until it works. The only time I use a media query now is when some third-party package does not work within these layout constraints.
Writes and Write-Nots by Paul Graham
Writing is thinking. Programming is writing code, which implies programming is thinking. If you are a programmer and have writing skills, it's a NeoBooster for your career. Now, since AI will replace all the mediocre writing, we have to level up our writing skills even more.
📺 Videos to Watch:
The Best Programmer I Know • Daniel Terhorst-North • GOTO 2024
My takeaways are that the underlying problems with programmers are:
We make things complex to feel better rather than focusing on getting things done.
We get attracted to new shiny tools, which distract us from focusing on the current problem.
We want to fix our own problems first, rather than thinking about how solving this problem will impact the team.
Current Software Engineers have no Deep Knowledge (Jonathan Blow)
Oh boy! I couldn't agree more with him on every word he said in this video. There has been a lot of research on Deep Knowledge vs Shallow Knowledge. A simple example would be that Shallow Knowledge is knowing how to find the SELECT query to fetch all data in a table, while Deep Knowledge is understanding how these SELECT queries work under the hood.
My thought is that shallow knowledge will allow you to move faster, but then there will be a point where you hit the ceiling of shallow knowledge. That’s where Deep knowledge will allow you to think in a way the programmer did not think of. It can also help in identifying bugs or opportunities to make the existing program better (an opportunity for open-source contribution).
🪶 Quotes from Books
📦 Code from Packages
Shadcn Flutter
A set of widgets and utilities for building applications in flutter. Optimized for web applications. This is a port of the shadcn UI package to flutter.
FVP (Flutter Video Player)
A plugin for official Flutter Video Player to support all desktop and mobile platforms, with hardware accelerated decoding and optimal rendering. Based on libmdk. You can also create your own players other than official video_player with backend player api.
👋🏻 That’s it, Folks
If you are interested in Flutter coding challenges, then you can subscribe to the my new Substack below.
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