With the dawn of a new year, bringing new possibilities and new ideas to the horizon, we opened the year our way, with 2021’s very first Flutter Remote Meetup, organized and hosted by FlutterBLR & GeekyAnts. Bringing the community together for three hours to share nothing but Flutter goodness is what we love to do and driving innovation and collaboration has always been our motto.
Speaking of collaborations, this edition of the Flutter remote meetup was made possible in collaboration with The @ Company. The @ company has been working tirelessly to break the common notion around data security and giving control back to the people by enabling people to have a single true identity on the internet that gives them complete control over the data they share.
Needless to say, there was a lot of talk planned on the cards around data privacy, security and Flutter. The agenda of the event included two talks by guest speakers and a panel discussion on ‘Building Trust In Apps’.
Watch the entire session here:
The following is a quick account of the events that transpired at the Meetup:
Simple State Management With Riverpod: Sameer Kashyap
Sameer, a final year student presented how he prefers to handle state in Flutter using Riverpod. There are more than 50 State Management packages available in the market today. The Flutter team at Google suggests Provider for beginners but it doesn not come without its problems. Sameer pointed these problems out and filled the gaps with Riverpod. Riverpod is Complie safe, Flutter independent, can combine providers and has a lot more benefits. He then discussed the basics of using Riverpod. He discussed the many ways through which you can create Providers of different and same types, wrap your apps with Provider’s scope and finally consuming them. He then walked the viewers through building a simple To-Do app in 5 steps using Riverpod and showed a quick demo of the same app.
All About Null Safety - Ganesh SP
A software technologist at Phillips, Ganesh took this opportunity to talk about Null Safety, why it is needed, how to write null safe code and extra steps that you can follow to make your code Null safe. He first described what Null means and why it is important to make your code null safe. He touched base on how Dart Analyzer works and talked about some Null Safety principles that can be followed for beginners. He then explained how you can implement Null Safety features in different aspects of your Flutter code. He also talked about using nullable variables, list and set types, Map types and enabling null safety in Flutter.
Building Trust In Apps - A Panel Discussion.
The main event of the afternoon was an amazing panel discussion on Building Trust In Apps. The following were the panelists for the discussion:
- Venkat Raju, Advisor, @company
- Jagannadh Vanguri, Lead Architect, @company
- Sarika Gautam, Engineering Manager, GeekyAnts
- Souvik Biswas, 3rd Year College Student
- Digvijay Wanchoo, Moderator
The discussion started off by defining what privacy means in the modern world and on the internet. Privacy has always been viewed as a basic human right, such is not the case on the internet. The panelists talked about how current systems are not really adept at protecting data and securing information on them. By defining a clear distinction between what should be considered as private data and the kind of data that is acceptable to be shared, the panelists talked about the frameworks that are enforced to protect data and how there are loopholes that don’t let them do so. The discussion then took a turn towards an industry perspective on privacy and why major companies are being brought under scrutiny for the way they handle data, the effect of GDPR, CCPA and relevant regulations of similar kinds on application development and if developers should really be aware of securing data while developing apps. Finally, Flutter was brought to the table and was evaluated as a good framework for developing secure apps and visions of a secure and better future were shared by the panelists from their own perspectives.
It was truly an amazing afternoon, well spent with the amazing folks on YouTube and The @ Company. It was simply a pleasure hosting this event and we look forward to many more collaborations with these beautiful folks in the future.
