How's it going? I thought I'd come and put some thoughts down about my experience of picking up a new language/framework and discuss some ways of learning that I've been using over the last month or so.

For the first time in a few years, I've had a prolonged bit of time during work hours to focus on internal projects & upskilling due to a few client projects ending around the same time. This can be a little unnerving at first, but it's important to take it as an opportunity to increase your value to wherever or whoever you work for.

I decided to focus on learning a mobile framework, as my company is primarily a Mobile App company. Our stack for apps is split between Swift (iOS) and Flutter (Android/Cross Platform). As I'm an android user (Google Pixel 9 Pro) I figured I'd pick up some Flutter.

In the age of LLMs it's tempting to take shortcuts to expedite the proces when doing something like this. You could jump straight into a codebase and be writing some fairly complex stuff using Cursor within minutes. My opinion is by doing something like this you're only screwing yourself over down the line. I decided to build a learning pathway using Claude where I could tailor it exactly to my own needs.

I was able to provide it with my exact level of experience, other languages I've worked in, and what I was hoping to achieve from the project. This allowed it to generate a list of useful modules to follow.

I'm a fan of tutorials in general, especially when you're lucky enough to find one that feels like it's made exactly for you, so having the ability to essentially build your own within a few minutes was really cool. It's pretty amazing to think about how far it's come and how much our general approach to programming has changed over the last few years.

Working through the tutorials really helped build the fundamental knowledge of working with Dart and Flutter, and at this point I was lucky enough to get to spend some time building out a proof of concept using Flutter for a colleague of mine's project. The app is called SoonCall, and iOS users can check it out right now. It's invaluable for keeping track of relationships with your friends, especially if you're someone like me where you could easily let days and weeks go by where you keep meaning to check in with someone but never get round to it. It's also really well built with an awesome UI and UX. More news to follow down the line about a potential Android release!

Thanks to Mark for letting me be a part of this!

In general I've been pleasantly surprised by my brief foray into App Development. There's a lot more learning to be done, especially around the whole deployment side of things. I've been working on my own app, something that probably warrants it's own blog post down the line, and I've been pretty surprised at just how involved it is at getting something released onto the Play Store in production. I've not tried releasing for iOS yet 😅.

That's all for now. Take care!