And yet the company where I work can't find enough Flutter talent.
I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
141–150 of 308 posts
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#142So what would be the best mobile development setup for someone who: - prefers to work in a Unix-like environment (e.g. Linux); - prefers to code in Vim; - prefers to have a single unified codebase for different mobile platforms; - prefers to test applications on a Linux machine running an X server.
Are you aiming at that? Flutter should work well for that scenario. I'd use an IDE to simplify testing in an emulator, but you could manage that manually from the terminal.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it to find a few mainstream opensource projects and emulate what they're doing in a given language when it comes to packaging and best practices? Other than awful, unsuitable for production languages like ruby.
Most open source solutions are meant to be building blocks for larger projects. It’s up to you to know what’s best for your organization based on prior experience. If you’re not in the C# ecosystem would you know how badly you are shooting yourself in the foot using Entity Framework when you should be using Dapper (a micro ORM invented and used by Stack Exchange)? On the other hand, would you know the limitations of…
I don't write crud apps, but if I did, I'm sure I could sort out which ORM is the right one for my usecase.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#144So what would be the best mobile development setup for someone who: - prefers to work in a Unix-like environment (e.g. Linux); - prefers to code in Vim; - prefers to have a single unified codebase for different mobile platforms; - prefers to test applications on a Linux machine running an X server.
React Native may be a good bet, while testing with an Android emulator. However, you won’t be able to build an app-store-approved iOS app without Xcode tools, which are not officially available on Linux. The CLI tools for building mobile apps are definitely not up to par with the IDEs though.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#145I have worked as an Android developer for about two years, then had to do project in Flutter. Learnt it over a weekend and getting the UI right took me less time then if I were to do it in native Android (before compose).
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#146Earlier 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…
> Modern development requires knowing the toolchain framework, idiosyncrasies, foot guns, best practices, etc. All this stuff is the same as learning the details of the language. Once you know the pattern it’s not hard to use it in a context with incidental differences in details. It’s usually more than days, but can easily be weeks or months — it depends on how well you really know the patterns. If you really know t…
I’m a senior dev, having coded commercially for 20 years now, and I think you are correct.
In my time, I have been an embedded C developer, a kernel developer, MFC C++, then J2EE, then Mobile C# .NET, then Python we dev, Python DS, Python Scientific, DevOps, WebDev
These aren’t trivial projects, but entire systems, E.g. I solo built https://atomictessellator.com just to scratch my own itch learning quantum chemistry simulators.
I think you are 100% right, at about the 10-15 year mark learning new languages and tooling really is a matter of days, maybe a week if the tooling is very different. That’s 1 week from no experience in a language to “employable, productive member of a team”
At some point it all just clicks, I suspect the people above who are disagreeing and likely devs with maybe only 5-6 years experience who this hasn’t happened for yet.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#147Are 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?
Android to iOS is like React to Cobol. If you were a plumber using android you might know more about Android than a iOS developer.
That’s not really true, especially these days.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you hamstringing yourself?
(not op) This is not hamstringing. It’s a matter of preference. I prefer jeans to a tie and a costume. I prefer Emacs and Vim to Vscode. I choose jobs that allow me to wear jeans and code in Emacs.
There are plenty of jobs that will let you do that. Most of them will not be writing software that is built on X.
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#149Earlier 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…
> Modern development requires knowing the toolchain framework, idiosyncrasies, foot guns, best practices, etc. All this stuff is the same as learning the details of the language. Once you know the pattern it’s not hard to use it in a context with incidental differences in details. It’s usually more than days, but can easily be weeks or months — it depends on how well you really know the patterns. If you really know t…
My job as a lead was three fold and from my recent interviewing based on the jobs I’m currently looking at it’s the same (cloud+app dev)
1. Working with external/internal stakeholders to define business outcomes and deal with ambiguity and doing project management - from my experience at AWS (ProServe) you can be really good at this with hardly any technical proficiency
2. Determining what is the right service or combination of services to use and the overall architectural design. I could do this without any specific platform knowledge - I know what type of database I need. I know I need a messaging bus. I know the trade offs of different types of technologies.
I was able to go from never opening the AWS console to working at AWS in the cloud consulting department within 2 years. But I sucked during those two years while I was learning the ropes.
3. Using the “right” one of the literally 100+ services and being able to mentor junior consultants and help them troubleshoot complex issues.
The 3rd bullet point is where you need someone who has the specific skillset.
My experience at the second bullet point is the downside of hiring someone based on “potential”. The CTO who hired me threw me at the cloud initiatives without experience and let me figure it out. But paid me $30K less than he would have had to pay someone with experience. He would have never been able to push through the 20%+ raise I would have been looking for when I left 2 years later if I had stayed on that side of enterprise dev/BigTech compensation side.
He definitely couldn’t push through the 50% raise I ended up getting at BigTech.
Now that I did my bid and the pay/bullshit ratio is going too much in the wrong direction, I can go back to my former company (since been acquired) and ask for about the same I would have been asking for three years ago (a lot less than I was making at BigTech)
Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?
Not iOS, but I'm fairly confident I could be productive in an Android codebase in a week. The only reason I don't think I could do iOS is because I'd need to use a OSX, and I think it would take me longer to become productive in OSX. It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating n…
As someone that has done on and off Android programming as hobby since NDK was introduced in Android 2.2, and regularly follows ADB Podcast, I doubt it.
Every Android version is basically a reboot in many parts of the framework, the device fragmentation is hardly any better than J2ME days, several features are only documented via samples or Google IO talks, Gradle plugins require rewrites between upgrades, and each Android Studio release is a box of surprises what quirks it has.