It has been quite an exciting few years since I left Google in 2022. I had been on the Flutter team for 3 years by that point, helping it go from v1.0 to v3.0, from hundreds of thousands of users to millions. It was exciting, but time for a change. And boy did I get some! Over the next 3 years I did the following:

Do you have some free time? Are you excited to get involved in the Dart and Flutter ecosystem? Then have I got a deal for you!

NOTE: This content has been subsumed by the package I wrote to support declarative routing via the Navigation 2.0 API: go_router. This package is what I use now for my own projects and I hope that you’ll find it useful for your projects as well. Enjoy.

Lately I’ve been working on a little side project with a friend of mine and I’m the coder, so I get to pick the tech I want for the implementation. My choice is easy: Flutter! We’re targeting the web with our project for two reasons: 1) it makes distribution easy and 2) it enables us to do social media marketing with deep links to content that gets people to come to the site, sign up, … profit!

If you’re a Dart programmer, the curl command doesn’t really help you. Oh, it can tease you with of its wonderful functionality, but you still have to take anything you can do with curl and manually translate it into Dart code.

30 years ago, I paused a 5-year love of D&D to attend college. About six months ago, I picked it up again with my adult sons, who’d gathered for my birthday. We started with $20 on the D&D 5e Starter Set, which includes everything you need for a group to play: a subset of the 5th Edition D&D rules, a starter module, a set of pre-rolled characters and dice. My youngest son had learned all of the rules watching Critical Role, so I lead the interactive story telling as the DM, asking him for the specific mechanics as needed.

Back in the olden days, you could use whatever programming language you wanted to write your client-side code: ASM, C, C++, BASIC, Java, C#, etc. Hell, every language had a client-side UI framework attached (often more than one). Then the web hit and we used those same languages to generate HTML on the server-side. It was a polyglot world for client-side development right up until mobile made itself the #1 targeted format in the world (cue record scratching noise).

A while ago, I started building a brand new client app. I wanted to use all of the modern techniques to make it a great app and to make sure it had maximum reach. For me, that meant a Progressive Web App that would work from desktop and mobile browsers. And so that meant JavaScript. That was OK; I’d been through the 5 stages of grief for JavaScript years ago but the real question is, which client-side framework do I choose? To answer that question, I spent a great deal of time with a LOT of them:

Today, I was asked about the story behind my viking avatar: The avatar is years and years old. Peter Stern, a graphic designer friend of mine, put together a set of avatars for me for something (I forget what) and the viking is the one that resonated with me the most because of my Norwegian heritage, my physical stature and my general demeanor (those of you who know me have never asked why I choose a Viking avatar : ).