Flutter Warsaw Interview With Marcin Szałek

Before Flutter Warsaw #15, we interviewed our speakers and asked them about their development path in Flutter, what was the most challenging for them while using this technology, and who is their biggest Flutter inspiration.

💙Marcin is in love with Flutter since the alpha release in 2017. Founder of Fidev – a software company specialized in Flutter. Co-found and speaker on Flutter Europe and Flutter Lodz Meetup. Enjoys sharing Flutter knowledge on blog fidev.io and YouTube. Proud collaborator of Material Design and Firebase packages. In his free time, he likes to find beautiful mobile designs on Dribble and implement them.

[Mateusz Wojtczak] What is your background as a developer? What have you been doing before Flutter?

[Marcin Szałek] Before Flutter I’ve been mostly working in Android but I had a few episodes in Spring, Angular, and Machine learning as well :)

I think everybody knows you as a Flutter UI magician :) How do you come up with the ideas you share?

I don’t. I find them on the Dribble platform :) I wish I had designing skills to come with some awesome UIs, however, I always end up just using Material Design. Therefore my only chance to implement something nice is when I find great design work of someone else.

Are you working on something other than UI samples? Are you thinking about creating some libraries?

Back in Alpha days, I’ve created a number picker package (and a few others but they’re not really used). I can see two main problems with publishing packages: 1. You have to have time to support it. I hate when people are asking me to add some really reasonable feature to the package but I just can’t find time to do it. 2. I prefer sharing my work with the idea "Now you know how to do it. Go do it yourself", and it causes developers to become more confident. If I just shared the package, the message is "I can do it for you as long as the package fits your case." I prefer the first option :)

What about Framy? Where is this going? What are your thoughts about it after devoting some time to that?

We spent 2 months with 2 developers to develop Framy to the point where we can get some feedback. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t see clear gains from using it, and to be honest I also rarely find projects where Framy fits. Having said that, I still believe that there is a right approach to create this tool and I am still thinking about it in the back of my head. So it’s not fully alive yet but it’s not dead either :)

What would you suggest if I asked you how to learn Flutter animations and UI caveats? How do you do it?

1. Watch my Flutter Europe talk. 2. Find some designs you like. 3. Try to implement it. 4. Learn by failing on the way.

— That’s how I learned, there’s no hidden ancient knowledge, you just need to start getting into the problems and try working them out. There’s no shortcut.

What is the most annoying thing about Flutter development you come across in your day-to-day work?

Hmmm… Lately, nothing really annoys me. If I had to pick one, every time after doing some native coding in Kotlin or Swift I hate adding semicolons in Dart, but I get over it in a day or two.

What are your plans for the future regarding Flutter? Any new talks?

I have not even one single plan for the future. I guess I just live by a day :D

What’s the best library you’ve discovered lately?

Since I’m answering those questions after the talk, after your package preview I have started to use Albert’s Sorted in two of my projects and I really like it. :)

One feature you crave the most in Flutter or Dart is…?

Better handling of the mouse scroll wheel on the web. :)

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Flutter Warsaw Call For Papers

Flutter Warsaw is now one of the biggest Flutter meetups in Europe, attracting 100+ people for each online event. If you want to join us as a speaker and share your knowledge with others, please fill out the form below.