5 concepts every Flutter dev should know

It will overall make you a good developer

I have been working with flutter for a long time, and these are the things that I discovered are must-haves for any flutter developer, it will overall make you a good flutter developer in a long run.

1. State management architecture

This is one of the most important topics in the flutter community, it is quite important if you want to maintain a mid or large-size flutter project. It will help to create a project smoothly and add new features flawlessly. I already wrote an article about why architecture in flutter is important and what architecture I chose, you can read it here.

2. Testing

This is a single topic that I did not understand why it is important earlier in my career, but as I go ahead in my career and got experience with multiple projects and issues that came in a production environment. I have realized in a hard way why this is as important. If you still want more reason to consider testing, Let this book from Uncle bob convince you.

3. IDE Shortcuts

IDE shortcuts really? you must be thinking, this is one of the most important things that I need to learn. Let me explain why, we’re devs we spend most of our time writing code and debugging, which of course includes a keyboard and we want to use it as efficiently as possible. Studies show that using keyboard shortcuts allows working 10 times faster than using a mouse.

Benefits:-

1. It saves you a ton of time.
2. It makes us productive and doesn’t let us lose focus.
3. And of course, it makes you look cool (in movies have you noticed actors never use a mouse)

I prefer using VS Code, and I already wrote an article about my favorite vs code extension you can read it here.

For learning Ide shortcuts, this is one of the best video which will help you learn it. For Android studio lovers read this article.

4. Platform channel

In mobile development even though we are using a cross-platform framework, we need to interact with multiple SDKs and libraries which are only available for the native platforms. Platform channel gives you the superpower to interact with native SDK. And I want you to have this superpower, if you are a beginner flutter dev almost in all interviews you will be asked if you’ve worked with native SDK using platform channel or not. It must be in your toolbox, I already wrote an article about building packages you can read it here.

5. Maintaining a project

You have worked hard and made a full-fledged application, You published it in-store and there you go, you start to get feedback and issues from users that need to be solved or a feature that needs to be in your app these are common things that will come upon daily basis while you’re maintaining a project.

My suggestions for better app maintenance:-

1. Always write tests, it’ll save you from issues and headaches in long run.
2. Focus on code coverage, with the coverage report you’ll know which code your tests are specifically covering and which part is not covered and cause issues later on.
3. I am reiterating here, choose a good architecture for your project and follow it.
4. Write strings, color codes, and styles on separate files as constant and reuse them.

There are my top five suggestions for anyone who is into flutter development.

I frequently write articles about technology and my experiences with them, you can see all my articles here.

Thanks for sharing your time with me, it means a lot.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash