Last month, I had the opportunity to attend Fluttercon USA in New York to present a talk on the upcoming code assets feature in Dart and Flutter. Since I maintain the sqlite3 and drift packages that need to talk to SQLite under the hood, I’m really looking forward to that feature which will make it much easier for Dart packages to interop with native code.
I’ve been looking forward to the conference for a while - not only because it lets me share my excitement about upcoming Dart features in front of an interested audience, but also because this was the first public talk I’ve given! Despite being active in the community for a long time, I’ve never spoken at a conference before and this was an excellent time to change that. Apart from my own talk, the schedule also looked promising and made Fluttercon USA an event I didn’t want to miss.
Since it has also been a while since I’ve attended a Flutter conference (I was at one in Berlin a few years ago), I want to use this post to share my impressions from this year’s conference in NYC!
Interesting talks and learning
One of the nicest things at Fluttercon was finally meeting all the amazing people I’ve only interacted with online before. I’ve had very pleasant conversations with drift users, PowerSync enthusiasts, dart_community Discord members, other speakers and also just random people at the conference. The Flutter community is incredibly friendly, and interesting conversations are everywhere!
Something I really liked is the mix of introductory presentations all the way up to advanced talks and roundtable discussions. At a previous Fluttercon I attended, I had the impression that there were relatively few intermediate and advanced talks, so it was good to see more variance this time. Since I really enjoy the Dart language on its own, it was also good to see that there were many talks that aren’t exclusively relevant to Flutter. In addition to my talk about native assets, there were two more dart:ffi-related talks and others discussing architecture principles in Dart.
As almost all talks were recorded, here are just three of the many good talks I was glad I could listen to. Maybe some of them are interesting to you as well:
- Mastering Dart Isolates: Custom Entrypoints for Smarter Background Processing: This talk starts with an introduction of isolates in Dart, and then quickly goes over to Flutter-specific concerns for apps with non-trivial background tasks. I’m using isolates a lot in drift, but especially the challenges of running multiple Flutter engines for UI and background tasks were fun to learn about!
- Binding Native Plugins with Flutter and Dart: This talk is somewhat adjacent to mine, but covers many more interop options and how they relate to each other. Definitely worth a watch if you’re interested in calling native libraries from Dart.
- Bringing a Legend to Life: Reimagining Rogue in Flutter: This was a super fun talk about porting a game written in eighties-style C to modern Dart. I’ve never played Rogue and understood at most half of the references, but there was good advice about dealing with extremely legacy code bases in there!
Here’s the full playlist on YouTube.
How Fluttercon can improve
Despite the amazing people and talks I was able to attend, one thing that stood out a bit was the venue. The weather during the conference was quite hot, and the location was not really suitable for that. I was told that’s a one-off though, so hopefully nothing that affects future Fluttercons.
Another first was that the conference was in a “Silent Disco” format, where, instead of using loudspeakers, we were supposed to listen with our phones over a wifi stream. In theory, that would make it easier to listen to another talk without having to switch rooms. In practice, the routers were quickly overloaded, leading to horrible latency and spotty audio. By the second half of the keynote, no one was using this anymore. Let’s hope we’ve all learned from that and don’t try it again.
Consider attending Fluttercon if you…
If you’re keen to meet people from the Dart and Flutter community, Fluttercon is a great place to be at! You can always watch the talks online, but I don’t think I could have had all these conversations anywhere else. So if you enjoy Dart, Flutter and the community, this is the conference for you.
I will also be back for Fluttercon in Berlin this year! So if you see me, come say hi!