12th React Native & 6th Flutter Meetup Bangalore 2020

With the beginning of a new year, it was only a matter of time before the most awaited meetup would bring its first edition in the new year and it came sooner. React Native Bangalore & Flutter Bangalore collaborated for the first time this year, pun intended, to bring the 12th edition of React Native & 6th edition of Flutter Meetup organized and hosted by GeekyAnts. 

The React Native & Flutter meetups have been one of the longest running event chains and every iteration has brought new knowledge and new faces to light. This edition was not an exception. It delivered everything that was expected from it and more.

But not everything was new. I, for one, was the same old host and emcee for the event. Sanket did not join me this time to introduce the company to the attendees so I dawned the gauntlet myself and did it anyway. The crowd was a good mix of working professionals and students, who were looking to explore these technologies and find common grounds with them to try them on for size.

With the show on the road, the first speaker on the cards was Manish Kumar, engineering manager at Jio. He presented his expertise on Architecting With React. His talk was focused more on React and how React can be overwhelming to begin with. He suggested ways to make it easier on new devs and shared the mantra behind picking React based on what matters to businesses and not on whims. He also shared some tips and tricks to be a more efficient developer and pointed out the things that need attention during development.

After his talk, the crowd refuelled at the GeekyAnts snack station for 15 minutes and talked amongst each other over coffee, which then trailed into the next talk of the day.

Nishith was the next speaker on schedule. He is a front-end developer at Mobinius technology and loves to travel, contribute to open source projects and experiments a lot. He talked about Building Multilingual React Native Apps Using React Context, a topic that was driven by his personal experiences with clients and developing products for them. Right off the bat, he spat some facts in the face of the crowd, telling them how nothing ever goes to plan. He shared the challenges he faced during the development of the application and how he dealt with changes on the fly using a context API. He then gave the audience a live demo using expo and showed them first hand the performance of the application.

Hasnen Tai was the next person that I introduced to speak to the crowd. A YouTube celebrity who runs the channel Trending Codes and an associate software engineer at Toshiba, he shared how Flutter came into his life and made him transition from a Web to a Flutter developer. He talked about his journey through his pet project, an app called Book A Book that he built to facilitate easy renting facilities on literature. As a part of his programme to learn Flutter, he built his app and talked about the architecture of the app, the methods he applied to manage data and implement the different features of the app and how he implemented state management.

Another quick break was required after such an inflow of knowledge and we understood it, and so the crowd was let loose for another pit stop before the final lap of the event. A lot of discussions were sparked over more java and chips, which were fruitful, I hope *fingers crossed*.

From team GeekyAnts, Aditya Soni stepped up on stage to share his experience of solving a problem in Flutter using Mathematics. His talk was titled Relative Scaling Using Mathematics In Flutter. Scaling has always been a major issue when it comes to designing apps to be responsive and he talked about how he faced a similar issue while working for a project. He then devised some mathematical formulae to solve that problem and he shared his genius with the attendees while pointing some important facts that are usually missed, such as accessibility features using a live case study.

The last individual to grace the stage was Vikram Pratap Singh, software developer at GeekyAnts, who brought to light the unused features of Flutter with his talk titled The old, the new and the unused features of Flutter. He talked about Spread collection operator, Mixins, Flutter compute function, Dart extension methods and how to use them. Before ending his talk, he revealed that he had not prepared slides for the talk, instead he had been presenting on a desktop app made in Flutter and the crowd was taken by surprise. He urged the attendees to use Flutter more extensively and not just for Mobile App development.

With the final talk delivered and the pizza delivery guy arriving on time, the event had come to a closure but not the fun. With pizzas & coke ready to be served to our attendees, the networking had just begun and people were discussing how awesome the event was, take my word for it. 

For a more visual account, watch the talks on our YouTube channel playlist.

The cozy setting, the immensely talented speakers and the great diverse crowd we hosted came together to make this meetup a memorable one, but who’s to say that the next time we won’t do anything out of the ordinary. There’s always magic in the air and it will continue to live on.

Until then…

Godspeed.