Hi there! I’m excited to share my flutter journey with you💃🏿💃🏿

I would love this to be a series and a record of how much I’ve learned in my journey as a flutter developer. And, as the saying goes, “We never stop learning". So, do well to send me feedback and share resources that helped you to understand concepts too.

It's been over 12months since I first ran my first app. And since then it's been a mix of tough, rocky, crazy, and happy days. I wouldn't lie, I've learned a lot and I have always wanted to share with everyone what I have written, but because I always made it look like some tasks I never got to do it.

However, this article is for a total newbie, someone that wishes to learn what flutter is, why they would want to start, and where to start from. This will be a quick one and after that, we'd have a series of other articles to help you understand better and get on your first mini-project.

Grab your reins, let's go!

What is flutter

“Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase”.

The above definition is what you'll find on the Flutter homepage and of course, it makes sense, but what of people like myself that would love to just understand this so well that we can explain it to a 5-year old?

I'll like to explain it to you like a 5year old. But before I do, I'll like to explain a certain word 'Framework'.

• Framework: A framework according to the Oxford dictionary is 'an essential supporting structure of a building, vehicle, or object'. It also means 'a basic structure underlying a system, concept, or text'.

A framework in software development provides functionalities, support, and a huge dump of common code that can be used by developers for building solutions.

In simpler terms, Flutter is developed by Google and allows you to use one programming language to intelligently create beautiful interfaces for almost any device. Built on dart, which is also a programming language built by Google, flutter seems to be making a lot more progress than we imagined.

To learn more on flutter visit the flutter official site Flutter.dev.

Why use flutter? Regardless of who is asking: Be it a tech lead, a Chief technical officer, a developer, an enthusiast, a startup founder, or just a curious mind wondering why everyone keeps talking about flutter and why they should make use of it in building products.

The following are reasons why flutter should be considered as a good option for mobile application development:

• Flutter has the capability to run on cross platforms.
• A fast-rising a supportive community.
• Fast and simple app development.
• Flutter is open source.
• Flutter has a collection of amazing widgets and tools.
• Flutter is pretty simple to learn. (or at least I will like to think so😫).
• Flutter is growing beyond mobile applications.
• A wide support of editor and design tools.
• Quality documentation and resources.

These and many more reasons are why I would recommend flutter to anyone. As much as it has its advantages, it sure has its bad sides which we will be discussing in a later article which I will be linking here.

However, as an advocate for peace, I try to not make comparisons to other frameworks or tools for development. It's a free world.

How to get started? The most interesting part about learning something new is actually the starting point because at this point you're hyped and willing to give this a shot.

To get started with flutter, I have some resources to link you to. I will be writing an article on this also, but right now I would like to just share links to resources that made it easy for me to install flutter and get started.

Resources to get started with Flutter

• Flutter.dev
• Andrea has amazing resources on his Blog.
• You could watch a promo course by London app brewery.
• And if you prefer text-based learning, this is a good shot Beginning Flutter: Android Mobile App Development by Educative.io
• Lastly, a document I contributed to Codenka flutter resources

These resources cut across different platforms and this is an honest effort to give you options. And if by any chance you can't find enough or couldn't get the idea around any concepts, please do well to reach out or google stuff. I am not the best flutter developer I know, but we could learn together or ask questions together.🤷‍♀️😎

In Conclusion Choosing a stack in tech is a decision a lot of us have to make someday and what's worse? Choosing the right tools to help us achieve our goals of being problem solvers and world-class developers. That is why I am hoping that this article answered basic questions you may have about flutter.

If there are any details you would love to read about, please do well to reach out. I am open to new ideas and suggestions to craft better content for newbies like myself.

See you some other time! Thank you!