On 28th May, we held one of our Flutter meetups in a hybrid setting at GeekyAnts campus for the first time. With speakers from various locations, it was a fun way for us to discuss this technology that allows developers to build mobile apps with ease. We had speakers from our Bangalore office, as well as joining in from other remote places through video conferencing and online mediums.
We had interesting talks from attendees and with the audience joining in from all parts of the country as well as overseas through the online mediums and we appreciate their participation. This session which was in lieu of the latest developments from the Google I/O dealt with the latest updates with Flutter which includes building NFT stores, QraphQL-powered Flutter apps, designing using Material 3 and dealing with performance and optimization issues.
Here’s a quick read of everything discussed at the event:
Building NFT Stores Using Flutter: Hasnen Tai
The first speaker in line was Hasnen Tai, a software engineer at Toshiba and a Flutter mentor who is also a video creator on YouTube and a Blockchain enthusiast. His experience with working with blockchain has given him the expertise to conduct this session where he expertly covered the topic of building NFT stores using Flutter. He kicked off the event by introducing web3 and talking about its decentralized and democratic nature which allows people to create smart contracts using it. Then, he delved into the topic of smart contracts and took the audience through steps to build NFTs while also adhering to ERC721 standards. He also spoke about the protocols for an RPC Web3 client and use it to establish a Metamask wallet connection using Flutter. To close this session and to allow for a practical demonstration that would provide the audience with a clearer understanding, he showed the audience a Flutter app that he had built to mint NFT tokens.
GraphQL Powered Flutter Apps: Sameer Kashyap
The next talk was delivered by Sameer Kashyap, a software developer from an organization called Frontrow which specialises in community learning and Edtech services. This session dealt with GraphQL and creating efficient Flutter apps in the most streamlined way using this technology. To highlight the advantages of GraphQL, he spoke about the limitations that come with working with Rest APIs and how they can slow down the entire development process considering they require multiple dependencies and calls to be made. He also accounted the brief history of GraphQL before moving on to explain how they allow for the customizing and specification of API calls with better syn, even when working with high-level programming languages. He then spoke about the architecture of GraphQL and how it works before applying this practically through an example where he showed us how to code a chat application when using Flutter.
Designing the Material Way- Material 3 in Flutter: Aditya Thakur
The third talk for the day was by Aditya Thakur, a Flutter developer who has worked with the technology for three years and is currently working for an organization called 100ms which is a company that specializes in video infrastructure. This talk was perfectly timed with the announcements that came with Google I/O where advancements were made to Material design. Google has just announced the advent of Material 3, the latest version of Material design which is an adaptable set of guidelines for UI design. Aditya also spoke about the issues that come with this latest version of Material design as well as what you can do to find a workable solution. This talk also dealt with the latest features that were announced which include changes made to TypeScript, dynamic color screens as well as a feature to send updates to the alert box before moving on to talk about the support that Flutter offers through a working example.
Performance and Optimization in Flutter: Vikas Kumar
The last talk for the day was delivered by an in-house developer- Vias Humar, who is working with us at GeekyAnts is quite well-versed with Flutter. In this session, Vikas covered the issue of fixing the performance and optimization issues that come up when working with Flutter. He spoke about how we can avoid having to build widgets multiple times while also comparing widgets with methods and contrasting the differences between both. He also dealt with the topic of concurrency in Dart which is basically running different things simultaneously to expedite development in Flutter. This session also dealt with computing and executing isolates which he demonstrated through an example before speaking about DevTools and how they can be used when trying to improve performance on Flutter.
You can watch the event here:
