Notes from Fluttercon 2023

I’m super happy to see big community events becoming a norm in Flutter community. To put this into perspective: it’s been almost 4 years since we were organizing Flutter Europe in Warsaw. That one-time event marked a huge milestone in our community back then and has been received beyond our dreams. Then last year a bunch of us met during Flutter Vikings and it was another sign how much we all crave events like that.

Flutter folks during the group photo. I think it’s just a small fraction of all the Flutter enthusiasts. Credit: Michał Jabłoński

This year Droidcon Berlin decided to expand its typical Flutter track to a standalone event - Fluttercon. I must say that it felt like Fluttercon became bigger than the Droidcon itself. Flutter merch, speakers, booths and discussions were visible everywhere.

In this short note I just wanted to highlight couple of remarkable talks and findings.

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First of all, it’s been amazing to see a significant number of first-time speakers breaking through the typical bubble of Flutter insiders. The variety of names and cultures, especially outside of Europe made this event really welcoming and inspiring.

Moreover, the quality of the talks itself has been splendid. The deep dives, complex showcases and fantastic demos made it all super engaging.

Some talks I enjoyed a lot:

• Demystifying Text Rendering in Flutter by Raouf Rahiche
• How Custom RenderObjects can make your life easier by Romain Rastel
• Healthy Code: A guide to Flutter App audit by Daria Orlova
• Shaders: beyond the gimmick by Renan Araujo
• Stop Treating Accessibility as an Afterthought: Concrete Steps to Build Inclusive Apps by Manuela Sakura Rommel

Eric Seidel on Fluttercon stage

It was super inspiring to listen to Eric Seidel talk about the future of Flutter ecosystem from outside of the Google perspective. Many of us rely on Google building the entire platform, but at the same time there’s so much opportunity for us - developers and users, to build solid experiences around the fantastic Flutter foundations.

Me during my talk. Look how big the screen was. Or how small I am. Credit: Renan the shader guy

Lastly, I wanted to say thank you to everyone attending my talk on Thursday afternoon. Seeing the full room was so stressful, but at the same time gave me a lot of energy to talk about the project I helped to build.

I spoke about the journey we had to take while migrating Visible from being quite naive in terms of network reliability to almost completely offline-capable app. We’ve spent over an hour after the talk discussing various ideas and problems other folks in the community have. I got several Twitter DMs talking about similar struggles.

Here’s the record of my heart rate throughout the talk as seen in Visible app. You can clearly see the stress rising before the talk, and how relieved I was once it was over :D

Here are the materials and slides btw.

Thanks for the amazing feedback and I hope to chat about offline-first architecture again!