Issue 49 - Everything at the Top Becomes a Sales Job

Dart Expressiveness. Slow Internet Engineering. Become AI-Native in 9 minutes. Build AI Assistant. tldr is Amazing. Render PDF in Flutter. Builder Runner 3X Faster. Does AI Saves Time & much more.

🎄🎅🏽 Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄🎅🏽 Wishing you a happy holiday with your family.

Let’s get started…

When I started my career as a junior developer, I always thought there were so many things I wanted to improve in the current codebase, like trying new libraries, IDEs, or frameworks, but I couldn’t because my Tech lead didn’t allow it.

Then I told myself: “Once I become a tech lead or reach top management, I’ll do everything I can to make the codebase better, try new frameworks, experiment with new ideas, fix tech debt, and use all the shiny new tools.”

When I finally became a tech lead, I thought I would spend my time solving coding and technical problems. But I quickly realized that my role as a technical lead was less technical than I expected. It had become more of a sales job where I was constantly selling ideas.

• I have technical debt to fix? I need to sell it in a way the business can understand.

• There’s a new feature coming in? I need to sell how important this feature is for our user and how challenging it is.

As I moved up the ladder, it became increasingly clear: its a sales job. From Junior Developer to as....

• Senior Developer: You’re selling ideas to junior developers on how to implement a feature.

• Tech Lead: You’re selling the idea that how challenging this next user features is to built to a senior developers.

• Engineering Manager: You’re selling business priorities to your tech leads.

• CTO: You’re selling the tech vision to your managers.

• CEO: You’re selling your product’s value to your CTO.

• Founders with Investors: You’re selling the idea to investors that you’re creating something valuable and impactful.

The list goes on. Eventually, everything becomes a sales job. So try to learn how to sell, even as a software developer. It will help you tremendously in your career.

What are you ‘selling’ right now in your current role? Comment below and let’s see the pattern!

Flutter with AI Workshop

AI won’t replace you. But a person who knows how to use AI will. If you are a Flutter developer and want to leverage AI in your day-to-day workflow, I am planning to run a workshop.

Checkout more details on flutterwithai.com

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💡Flutter/AI Tips:

1. Expressiveness of Dart in Flutter in AsyncValue

2. A rough sketch with 2-3 prompt iterations is all you need to get a “good enough”

✍🏻 Articles to read:

1. A.I. Is a Printed Birthday Card Train to Paris by Filip Hracek

A.I. is a productivity tool. That means it will not make our workdays shorter. It will only make them faster. That’s not nothing, of course, but don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you that A.I. will give us more leisure time. That’s not how new tech works. (If it was, we’d be working 1 day a week by this point.)

2. All It Takes Is for One to Work Out by A Learning a Day

• You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.

• You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home.

• You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.

• You don’t need ten universities to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.

3. Become the Person That You Would Like to Be Around by Hasif

• You could be the reason someone starts to believe again.

• You could be the reason they don’t feel invisible.

• You could be the pause in someone’s chaos, the warmth in someone’s winter.

4. Engineering for Slow Internet by brr

I am a fan of building offline-first apps, which is really challenging. Here the developer describe the issue they faced in the South Pole due to poor internet connectivity, making it difficult for websites and apps to load properly.

📺 Videos to Watch:

1. Give Me 9 Minutes, I’ll Make You AI-Native

• Link AI Chat as a resource in your project notes.

• Save AI-generated or reusable files in a folder to use as a reference for the next work.

• Ask AI to plan in phases and break them down into smaller tasks.

2. tldraw.computer - Steve Ruiz, Tldraw

What I have just watched!! I thought tldraw was only for drawing, but now I can turn drawings into images and diagrams. Create flows like n8n with simple drag and drop.

AI image generate from real-time drawing changes are my favorite.

3. Accelerating Dart Code Generation

We are not going to have macros to solve the code generation issue. However, we now have a build_runner, which is 3X faster.

4. Build an AI Avatar Personal Assistant | Full Pipecat Tutorial

Found a framework called Pipecat which allows you to quickly build voice agents with any service providers by simply plugging and playing the service into the pipeline.

For example, you can call a WhatsApp number to create a calendar invite by speaking to it. Building this kind of bots is now much easier.

I am planning to build a similar bot using Gemini. Comment below if you are interested in that idea.

📦 Code from Packages

1. Romanize

• 🌏 Multi-language support: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic

• 🔍 Auto-detection: Automatically detects the languages present in the input text

• 🛠️ Flexible & extensible: Easily create your own custom romanizer for any language or writing system

• 📦 Lightweight: Minimal dependencies, fast performance

2. PDFx

Flutter Render & show PDF documents on Web, MacOs 10.11+, Android 5.0+, iOS and Windows.

Includes 2 api:

• renderer Work with Pdf document, pages, render page to image

• viewer Set of flutter widgets & controllers for show renderer result

3. CodeForge

A powerful, feature-rich code editor created using Flutter

Bring VS Code-level editing experience to your Flutter apps

📚 Quotes From Books

🛠️ Tool I Found Useful

Presenterm

presenterm lets you create presentations in markdown format and run them from your terminal, with support for image and animated gifs, highly customizable themes, code highlighting, exporting presentations into PDF format, and plenty of other features. This is how the demo presentation looks like when running in the kitty terminal

😂Fun and Memes

1. Does AI Save Time

Link

2. Explain Tech Debt to me I am 5

3. How to have fun as an adult

👋🏻 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:

1. Build product architecture from scratch

2. Train existing developers to level up

3. Fix major bottlenecks in legacy codebase

4. Improve code quality

5. And most importantly, ship things faster

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