Hi guys, Hope you are doing Great!
Embarking on a journey into the realm of mobile app development, felt like stepping into a busy and always-changing world. As the seasons changed, so did my skills, and challenges in the vast landscape of development.
Today I will take you through my journey to becoming an Emerging Flutter Developer. From being unfamiliar with Dart, Android Studio Code, Widgets, Bugs & Errors, From Writing Messy Codes to Becoming a Growing developer - Here's my journey. Hope this helps you get started with yours as well!
Starting with a short backstory...
My name is Mahesh Bora and I have been learning to develop applications through Flutter for almost seven months now.
In my Sophomore Year of college, I found out that there's a good development culture in my college but a huge proportion of students seemed to be inclined toward Web Development. So, even I started learning HTML, CSS and Javascript. Did that interest me? Yes. But something still felt to be not as exact as I wanted it to be.
So, How did I start?
Then in November 2022, Devfest Nagpur happened. This is where I attended speaker sessions by Pawan Kumar and Deven Joshi and got to know about Flutter for the first time. I then further took a course on Flutter by Angela Yu. Sadly, didn't complete it till last. But this gave a good boost to my initial learning phase.
Then it took me several days to become comfortable with Android Studio Code's UI, Git & GitHub.
Later, I came across this playlist - "30 Days of Flutter" by Pawan Kumar on YouTube. I almost completed this playlist and started making something on my own parallely.
The Apps
My first App was a Weather App that simply updated the live details of a location calling the Weather API based on the location co-ordinates provided.
Later I created a Travel App, Grocery App, WhatsApp UI Clone, and some more and implemented different Widgets experimenting on the Frontend.
At this point I was confident to replicate a UI with atleast 85-90% similarity. I created many UI designs during that time but in terms of functionality I was still not up to the mark. I tried to expertise in UI to get started. So, I started looking for an internship online and joined Brewnbeer. My main aim in joining Brewnbeer was to learn Backend and to understand how I can optimize my frontend even better.
What did I learn in this internship?
I learned about the optimization of code in an effective manner for various screens. Tried implementing the Material3 design using animations through Flutter. Also, got to learn various animations such as Neumorphism, Lottie Animations, Tween Animations, etc.
The base learning on Frontend side for me was - Everything in Flutter is a Widget.
Currently, I am working on Firebase-Flutter interaction for a fully functional App. And I have an initial grip on basic CRUD operations, data fetching & uploading and authentication, API implementations so far.
What am I currently up to?
At this point, I am good at creating interactive UI for functioning applications and learning to get better at it with every passing day. I am still learning and exploring Firebase, API implementations, using DevTools for better performance, State Management and libraries such as RiverPod, GetX, Redux, BLoC and so on.
This is my GitHub Profile - Mahesh Bora 🧑🏻💻 - still learning and growing !👾
Major Takeaways...
The most important thing I learned here was that feeling dumb is an integral part of the process. You will feel dumb when you won't understand even a small snippet of code, or if a bug or an error pops up basically on every other footstep. But being comfortable with it is the best and the only way to learn something new.
Though the post is a bit long if you have reached the end, I appreciate your time and attention.
Would love to hear your story too! :)
Thank you!