Widget Tricks Newsletter #40

Flutter with AI Workshop. Cancel Future. Increase Luck. What You'll Wish You'd Known. System Thinking. How to use Git Worktrees. Flutter Video Editing. Software Subscription. Basic Memory & much more

Burhanuddin Rashid

Aug 31, 2025

📝Post of the month:

If you are interested, please fill out this form before it gets full. For more details, check flutterwithai.com.

1. How to cancel Future using CancelCompleter

2. Avoid String/int as "id" for your objects in Dart

3. Flutter Widget Previewer

✍🏻 Articles to read:

1. How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck by Cate Hall

I've been telling Junior devs that just giving and doing something for other developers will definitely increase luck surface area, such as blogging, speaking, giving feedback, and organizing events. Please do that more.

2. Learn Like an Athlete by David Perell

Sharing your work is like inviting friends to your home. It forces you to be clean and double check everything, which accelerates the learning process.

3. I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .Txt File by Alireza Bashiri

I've been through this. I've used all the apps in the world to sync data with each other, to create fancy dashboards to see everything on one page.

Before I moved to the Bullet Journal method with pen and paper for my task, all the apps which I used previously helped me to identify my flaws which helped me understand what systems do not work for me. If I had started directly with pen and paper without this app I wouldn't have kept it for long.

4. What You'll Wish You'd Known by Paul Graham

It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.

Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.

If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.

The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost.

You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.

📺 Videos to Watch:

1. Why Systems Thinking Is the Most Powerful Tech Skill

What if I told you the most valuable tech skill isn’t about learning new programming. It's about thinking in systems. Connecting Dots. How inflows affect the outflow.

2. Git Tutorial #39: How to Use Git Worktree to Manage Multiple Branches | Learn Git

git worktrees: a simple and elegant solution to work on multiple branches at the same time.

Let's say you are working on “featureA” and suddenly there is a production bug you want to fix. The usual workflow is to stash the changes in the current branch or create a WIP commit, but it's messy and not clean.

In git worktrees, you can run “git worktrees add main” and it will create a main folder at the top of the current directory. You can make changes to that main directory without affecting the current work and push commit as usual.

The important thing to note here is that a worktree is helpful when the project you are working on does not require any initial setup. Just switching branches makes it work.

However, in a big project with a lot of modules where you need to do initial setup and require file generation, worktrees might not be suitable in this case. Switching branches this way consumes more time to redo setup and generate files again.

3. You’re Not an Android Developer Anymore - Stacy Devino | Droidcon New York 2025

We need to shift to the left side of our current role more, to become Product Engineers. Not just Android or Flutter, but individuals who handle the majority of the stack in their product.

4. Ira Glass on Storytelling 3

A Short motivation video on why failing is important

📦 Code from Packages

1. "aloisdeniel/footage: Write videos in Flutter."

"Footage" is a Flutter package that allows users to create videos, animations, and slideshows using Flutter knowledge. It enables automated video production with server-side rendering.

2. GitHub - jarulraj/periodic-table: A Periodic Table of System Design Principles

This paper creates a "periodic table" of over 40 key system design principles found across many computer domains. These principles help explain common challenges like concurrency, consistency, and adaptability in system design. The table aims to make these ideas easier to teach, communicate, and apply broadly.

Todoist
Evernote
Readwise Reader
Cursor
Google Drive sync PC : One plan
Google photos

Free Tool I use

Apple Notes for quick notes
Raycast
Obsidian
Script Kit
Super whisper (Audio to text)
Google sheets to logs
Google docs
Voice memos
Excel draw

System I used

PARA system for notes organization

🛠️ Tool I Found Useful

1. Basic Memory

2. Historical Tech Tree

😂Fun and Memes

1. The Interactive Handbook on Data Structures and Algorithms by cartesian.app

2. For the Players Since 1995

3. OneMillionScreenshots

👋🏻 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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