A look back at the first year of Flutter Community, by Nash Ramdial and Jay (Jeroen) Meijer
The idea for Flutter Community was simple; create a place that users can visit to find the latest packages and articles written by Flutter developers from around the world. With this goal in mind, we set out to make it a reality. First, our GitHub organization was created by Simon Lightfoot (The Flutter Whisperer) and Jeroen Meijer. This was quickly followed by the Flutter Community Medium Publication, maintained by Nash Ramdial and Scott Stoll.
From the very beginning, there was a lot of enthusiasm from the wider community about the idea. Articles and packages slowly began filling Flutter community from 3rd party developers all over the world. As the months progressed we slowly grew from an average of one article per week, to two articles each day. Popular posts such as “Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron” by Norbert Kozsir, “Flutter Layout Cheat Sheet” by Tomek Polański, and “Parsing complex JSON in Flutter” by Pooja Bhaumik were all published on Flutter Community Medium.
On the GitHub side of things, packages such as “flutter_downloader” by HungHD, Flutter Launcher Icons by Mark O'Sullivan and “responsive_scaffold” by Rody Davis all found their homes on our GitHub. According to Jay Meijer, the primary maintainer of Flutter Community GitHub:
"I'm very happy with how the GitHub turned out. We've already had a load of packages submitted that are now hosted by Flutter Community. Multiple people have become maintainers of packages that would have otherwise died out, which is one of the most important things we wanted to achieve with the organization.
Going forward, we'd like to be more clear to our users on how to submit their packages and what our guidelines are, so we can make Flutter Community's packages easier to use and a better place for package maintainers and users alike.
Thank you to all the contributors and maintainers. It's awesome to see people work together."
Today, there are 22 packages under the Flutter Community GitHub and over 360+ articles published under our publication. In addition to this, we have 16.9K followers on Medium, 3900+ on Twitter and, on any given day, there are at least 10K unique daily visitors and over 1 million minutes read per month on Medium.
In addition to Medium and GitHub, Flutter Community has also been really active at events and meetups from across the world.
In addition to Medium and GitHub, Flutter Community has also been really active at events and meetups from across the world. As may recall, George Medve’s @nodinosaur Flutter London/Flutter Community booth was a huge hit! George was assisted by Scott Stoll @scottstoll2017, Simon Lightfoot @devangelslondon, Swav Kulinski @robotoasterdev, Rafal Wachol @RafalWachol, Edgar Gonzales @efgpdev, Tomek Polański @tpolansk, and Mark O’Sullivan @MarkOSullivan94. Collectively, they answered hundreds of questions from attendees curious about Flutter.
The day after Droidcon, we had the droidcon2gether event by SkillsMatter where “The Five Guys” taught a free, 5 1/2 hour workshop on Flutter!
Hack19 was also another event hosted by the community. For the uninitiated, Hack19 was a global hackathon organized by Simon Lightfoot (Flutter Whisperer), Martin Rybak and Frederik Schweiger. It was hosted on June 1st of this year by Flutter Community with over 900 participants taking part in the event to build an app from the following categories:
- Social network
- Chat/Slack alternative
- Job finder
- Mentor Matcher
- Text translation
- Stack Overflow search
- Code search
The results of Hack19 was amazing, the participants blew everyone away with their creations. Below are some of the winning apps from Hack19:
Best Beginner - Fireslime from the Flutter Campinas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcBuhLp17o4&&
Organiser Favorite - FlutterHub from Flutter Chicago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFaaARAvchU&&
Community Favorite - Flutter Ninja from Globant India
https://github.com/debasmitasarkar/flutter-ninja-repo
Started by Scott Stoll about a year and a half ago, “The Flutter Freelancer’s Office” has continued to attract people who are trying to go it alone as they learn and work in Flutter. Until you try it, you don’t realize how much it helps to be able to turn to a human being and say, “Hey, I’m getting this issue with a Column, can you take a look?” And, once you do try it, you’ll never want to go back to posting questions to a text forum and waiting hours for answers, or trying to describe things in a text chat.
In “the office, not only can someone look at your screen and examine your code, you can give them control of your mouse and keyboard as they “sit at your computer” and fix the code, explaining it to you while you watch!
After a while, we realized that other people trying to learn Flutter would really appreciate being able to come in and get help with Flutter, in a live environment with other human beings. Thus, HumpDayQandA was born. Being a Q&A every Wednesday (the Hump in the middle of the week), the name was intuitive and it quickly became a brand unto itself. Over time, the Flutter and Dart teams noticed and they decided to help us out be occasionally sending a “guest Googler” for an hour or so, to answer questions, get feedback from the community and pass us a few super-secret tips.
That last part might not be true but it’s still really cool to be able to sit down with someone from the Flutter or Dart team and have your questions answered by those who would know best. Only a few (nowhere near all!) of our past guests include Eric Seidel (@_eseidel), Tim Sneath @timsneathand, Filip Hráček @filiphracek, Emily Fortuna @bouncingsheep, and perhaps one of the most important member of the team, Shams Zakhour (@sfshaza2), the artist who invented the mascot, Dash!
And in a class by herself, we have the “Batwoman of Flutter”, Nilay Yener @nlycskn!
The past year has been an amazing one for everyone! We all learned a lot and truly enjoy helping others learn and expand their knowledge of Flutter and Dart. As we enter the second year of Flutter Community, we hope to keep writing and publishing more high-quality articles, packages, YouTube videos and connecting with developers from around the world through HumpDayQandA and in person events.
Finally, THANK YOU ❤️ to everyone who has supported us over the past year! Whether you’re a member of our Patreon or just someone who enjoys reading articles on Flutter Community, we would like to sincerely thank you for your continued support. The community and people around Flutter are truly amazing and we look forward to continue helping the community for another year 🍻