Neil Jay Warner

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@CommandDash @useRiverpod how has this been going?

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@CommandDash eager for intellij :)

[Andrea Bizzotto 🇺🇦 @biz84]

Should you use 3rd party Flutter boilerplates or templates?

Do they really help you to ship faster - without having to implement all the boring stuff?

Or are there drawbacks you should be aware of?

Here's my take. 👇

The main selling point sounds good → get a Flutter project already pre-configured with many of the things you need:

- Authentication? Check
- Localization? Sure
- State Management? Everyone needs that, right? 😉

Unfortunately, most boilerplates are fundamentally flawed because different apps have different requirements.

They were never designed with *your app* in mind. Rather, they are usually too broad, include too many packages, and are often out of date (I know because I downloaded many of them, and that's what I observed).

Consider this: as soon as you start with a boilerplate, you end up borrowing a ton of code and packages that:

1) you don't fully understand
2) you don't need in the first place
3) may not even compile with the latest Flutter version

If you dig deeper, you end up discovering:

- Arbitrary folder structure
- Features you don't need (maybe your app only needs local storage, but you ended up importing an entire authentication system)
- Poor coding standards (asynchronous gaps, helper builder methods rather than widgets, etc.)
- A bunch of unnecessary design patterns (applied inconsistently across the codebase)

Sounds like a bad dream to me. 😱

So, what kind of packages and tools should you want?

- those that solve one problem and they do it well
- those that are regularly maintained
- those that give you fine-grained control over how to configure things (some good examples: flutterfire CLI, firebase CLI, shorebird, flutter_launcher_icons, flutter_flavorizr)

Remember: it's your job to figure out how to combine/use them to satisfy your app's requirements.

Of course, code reuse can be extremely valuable. For many years, I have ported my best code across projects.

The key word here is *my*. Not someone else's.

So, rather than looking for a quick fix (and regretting your choices later), consider writing your own collection of reusable components and classes. If you do this well, you will ship faster.

Happy coding!

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@FlutterDev jsoncodable / meta programming i think

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@eduardoflorence @FlutterDev the asset bundling with flavors?

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@MarvelIkechi @schlimmson @shorebirddev

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@NickyHajal @schlimmson if you really want to you can do server driven ui package by google themselves and code push by @shorebirddev

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

does anyone know how i can get free flutter swag for a high school career fair - I am a sr dev and i would be talking about what i do a my job which i'm happy to say is mostly flutter :) @flutterdev #Flutter @nlycskn

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

#Flutterturns5 My first commits with flutter on github were Sep 2017 for codelab and May 2018 for a real project, albeit MVP/POC type stuff. so i've been super excited all along :)

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@gaetschwartz @biz84 you can consider @RandallSchwartz 's technique of runApp(SplashApp(): initStuff() runApp(realApp()) or the super high reated flutter favorite native splash screen plugin has a .preserve capability. i'm curiouas what you think is better at this point a year later @biz84

[Neil Jay Warner @njwandroid]

@Google that's awesome @Google can't wait to help