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I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

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Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#71

Are mobile stacks so specialised that it's difficult to switch between them? Out of curiosity, how long would it take a flutter dev to become productive in some other stack?

It's not difficult to switch between mobile stacks. It's just companies make you believe that it is, to promote a "one codebase efficiency" mantra. For me, to be efficient with cross-platform solutions, you need a deeper knowledge with the underlying native frameworks.

I started with Blackberry SDK plugin with Eclipse, then to Android, Windows Mobile (UWP) and iOS in that order. Majority of those projects I have worked are written in native. It's not that hard to switch since you can find familiar concepts in each frameworks and stacks.

Of course, I have been also part with cross-platforms solutions but it just cannot cope up with the yearly updates and deprecation especially if your apps are critical.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you going to hire me to lead a team working on a 10 year old complicated Java app when all of my “enterprise” experience is in the .Net ecosystem? Yes. The skills are fungible.

While that might be the 'right' answer, it's also in the minority for many job openings/postings.

You're not wrong, but thankfully job openings are more fungible than ever too, with remote positions open at plenty of companies that won't make that particular (not-)hiring mistake.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#75
For anyone reading this and if you want to develop mobile apps, just first learn native iOS/Android platforms, they are not going anywhere before you get tempted by other flashy technologies like Flutter or React Native. Most companies including the ones that created these cross platform frameworks, build thier core apps using native stack for a reason.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#76
post #15

I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…

Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…

Personally, yeah, I would have no trouble hiring you for any of those things, based on your experiences. I wouldn't have expectations that you'd be the most productive member of those teams "in a few days", but a few months, sure. And I would expect your wisdom from working on a bunch of different things to be a lot more impactful than whatever fine grained details you don't yet know of the exact technology we're using.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…

> Are you going to hire me to lead a team working on a 10 year old complicated Java app when all of my “enterprise” experience is in the .Net ecosystem? Yes. The skills are fungible.

And I would be a horrible hire to lead a team where I’m expected to mentor junior developers on best practices, which packages to use, how best to work with technical debt, etc.

In the real world, I’m interviewing for positions where they are looking for leads at cloud consulting companies who can mentor juniors and that they can put in front of customers for recommendations, estimating statements of work for implementations on AWS and it’s specializing in application development where you are integrating with AWS services. I have lots of experience with most things AWS.

No one should hire me to do the same for either Azure or GCP. Sure I could do the initial discovery, pre-sales, needs analysis, business outcomes, etc. But I wouldn’t have a clue about what services to use and i definitely couldn’t mentor and help troubleshoot implementations on Azure or GCP.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you going to hire me to lead a team working on a 10 year old complicated Java app when all of my “enterprise” experience is in the .Net ecosystem? Yes. The skills are fungible.

While that might be the 'right' answer, it's also in the minority for many job openings/postings.

Yep, this is true. But that just means that it's something of a super power for organizations that don't make this myopic mistake.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#80
post #15

I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…

It's one thing knowing the language, it's another being productive with the ecosystem.

One takes between a few days and a few months. The other is a few years, unless you get pro training.

I guarantee most people starting with Python from another language will be productive quickly. But they will curse the packaging ecosystem because they will follow a lot of tutorials that don't follow this:

https://bitecode.substack.com/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simpl...

And they'll get screwed.

They will have a hard time learning this:

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/relieving-your-python-packaging-p...

It will take a long time of trials and errors, suffering all the way.

And this is true for many other aspects: good editor config, good web deployment story, good app sharing system, good tooling setup, etc

A runtime or a stlib is quite small and stable. But an ecosystem is gigantic and moving.

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