A big thank you to everyone who joined us virtually on Tuesday evening for our first online Dart and Flutter webinar workshop!
This was the first in a series of workshops introducing you to the amazing experience of coding in Dart and Flutter.
Of course, we couldn’t have done this without the support of Kin + Carter Create, and the encyclopedic knowledge of Swav Kulinksi who came up with the content and led the session!
A word from our partners Kin + Carta Create
“At Kin + Carta Create we believe growth is built, not theorised. We’re makers, builders and creators by nature, and we come to work every day to build experiences your customers will love and technologies your business will thrive on.
Our approach is simple: Accelerate idea-to-value by striking the ideal balance of human-centred design, Agile engineering and the realities of affecting change at scale. Including new product development, service design and cloud modernisation, we take a hands-on approach to transforming our clients’ business. We’re headquartered in London and have delivery offices in Chicago, New York, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. “
Back to the workshop
Running an event like this was a fresh experience for myself and the Code Untapped team. Having Swav lead the session gave us the opportunity to listen to a master talk about his craft and to join in the activities along with all the other participants.
And as a first-time “participant” at a Code Untapped event I.. was… blown… away…
Intro from Andre
We started with a great intro to Kin + Carta Create from the fantastic Andre Hitchman. He is one of K+CC’s Android Software developers. He filled us in on some of the real-world projects that they are currently working on ranging from Pay as You go apps to Computer Vision for crop analysis.
Over to Swav
Swav then covered a quick introduction to Dart and Flutter before leading the way with a truly engaging and interactive workshop.
The workshop was broken down into the following sections
- 1st coach-led workshop introducing basics of Dart
- A short fireside chat between Code Untapped co-founder Jason Halstead and Swav discussing some of what had been learned during the intro workshop
- 2nd coach-led workshop touching on some more advanced aspects of Dart
- A wrapup fireside chat between Code Untapped co-founder Jason Halstead and Swav discussing some of what had been learned during the advanced workshop
Swav covered a range of topics from simple variable assignment in Dart and flow control statements all the way to using mapping and eventually how to output to a UI using Flutter.
What made this workshop so engaging was the innovative use of a tool known as DartPad https://dartpad.dev/. Swav had prepared a series of Dart code gists which he then shared with the audience via DartPad links. See the following link for a very basic example https://dartpad.dev/2b0003d5a84e10cc41175329798a6631.
By clicking these links we were all able to not just follow the workshop but we could experiment with the code examples that he talked us through.
Slight mishap
Unfortunately, the gods of live events weren’t shining upon us and the DartPad site had a few VM issues which meant we had to switch to the fallback plan of Swav sharing his own screen. So we lost the interactivity but at least Swav now had our full focus! But even with the DartPad issue, it was still a great workshop and we are extremely grateful for the content and knowledge that was shared.
It’s safe to say that Code Untapped will be using this approach in the future. Going forwards if we can’t do a workshop in an interactive fashion it won’t be happening!
Fireside Chats
Special mention goes to the fun, engaging and educational fireside chat sessions between Jason and Swav who discussed topics covering:
- Why did Google develop Dart in the first place?
- How can devs stay up to speed with changes in the Dart/Flutter ecosystem?
- What are the pros/cons of using Dart?
- Why would you choose Dart over React Native for cross-platform support?
- How easy is it to optimise Dart for low resource environments like the Raspberry Pi?
- What is the most interesting Dart widget you have seen?
- How is Flutter/Dart integrated into cloud technologies?
- How easy is it to deploy Flutter apps?
- How do I find Dart resources and Flutter widgets?
So much was shared in the session that I have purposely held back from writing about it all in detail, but if you want to learn more about Dart and Flutter then stay tuned as we will be running a full series of fortnightly workshops with Kin + Carter Create and of course Swav will be sharing more advice and knowledge with our Code Untapped members.
I have included a few useful resource links below so please check them out.
Again a big thank you to Kin + Carta Create, Andre Hitchman and Swav Kulinski.
And a big thank you to all our members who tuned in.
See you next time (virtually).
Useful links
- DartPad – Cloud-based Dart coding environment
- Dart.dev – Dart resources
- Flutter.dev – Flutter resources
- Pub.dev – Dart packages
- Kin and Carta Create – The Kin + Carta Create website
