Widget Tricks Newsletter #38

Google I/O Bangalore. Who is hiring. Preview Annotation and Boundary Widget. All about layout calculation. GitHub self-hosted runner. Salary Negotiation. Tech promised everything. FL Draw & much more.

Burhanuddin Rashid

Jul 31, 2025

📝Post of the month:

💡Flutter Tips:

1. A LookupBoundary blocks widgets below it from accessing inherited data (like Theme or Provider) from above it.

2. @Preview Annotation is available in beta

This annotation allows you to preview and develop widgets independently. The API is still not stable.

3. Provide platform-specific feedback for a tap

💼 Job To Apply:

Senior Mobile App Engineer - (Flutter) at Beyond ONE

We don’t think about job roles in a traditional way. We are anti-silo. Anti-career stagnation. Anti-conventional.

Beyond ONE is a digital services provider radically reshaping the personalised digital ecosystems of consumers in high growth markets around the world. We’re building a digital services aggregator platform, with a strong telco foundation, and a profitable growth strategy that empowers users to drive their own experience—subscribe once, source from many, and only pay for what you actually use.

Salary Range: not mentioned.

✍🏻 Articles to read:

All I Know about Layout Calculation by Tsuyoshi Chujo

We often misunderstand the constraint errors we come across when learning Flutter because we did not grasp the basic understanding of how layout calculation works. I have attempted to explain it in my blog, but it is always better to understand with different examples. Hence, I am sharing this blog.

Notes to myself by Seth

Helping someone get what they want is easier than changing what they want

Become the person your future thanks you for and forgive the past for the mistakes it made

Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age: Leveraging Experience for Better Results by Manuel Kießling

“Six weeks of implementation can easily save two hours of planning”

These time-tested practices, and more than anything else, **the hard-earned human experience with these practices**, are more valuable than ever in the age of AI-assisted development — and far from obsolete.

📺 Videos to Watch:

1. Tech Promised Everything. Did it deliver? | Scott Hanselman | TEDxPortland

The first talk I saw of Scott was about 8 years ago. Since then, I have been his fan. This talk describes his journey in tech and what tech gives us. It had me when he said "they sold the van."

2. GitHub Actions Selfhosted Runners | easy devops tutorial ci/cd

In GitHub Actions, we can set up our own machine to run CI/CD pipelines. This saves a lot of money and allows for privacy. However, be cautious and use it on private repos only, as public repos can be a source of easy malicious attacks.

3. InteractiveViewer (Flutter Widget of the Week)

A widget that enables pan and zoom interactions with its child.

📦 Code from Packages

1. fldraw

A powerful, extensible, and high-performance infinite canvas and diagramming library for Flutter, inspired by tldraw and eraser.io

fldraw provides a complete toolkit for building applications that require node-based editors, whiteboarding, or any kind of interactive canvas. It's built from the ground up with performance and customization in mind, using a custom rendering pipeline to ensure a smooth experience even with a large number of objects.

4. Apple MCP tools

😂Fun and Memes

1. This blog is more educational, but I put it here because the rant is funny😂 and true.

2. An interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

👋🏻 That’s it, Folks

I am currently open for consultation part-time/full-time, specialized in mobile development with Android and Flutter. So if you are looking for someone to:

Build product architecture from scratch
Train existing developers to level up
Fix major bottlenecks in legacy codebase
Improve code quality
And most importantly, ship things faster

then reach out to me at info@burhanrashid52.com.

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