This tutorial covers local storage only, no Atlas device sync Normally I use SQLite for storing large amounts of data locally, and the sqflite package has served me well for that. However, I’m now working on a project that will require syncing data across devices, and I have no idea…

The pros and the cons In this article I’ll be referring to Flutter and Dart packages, but the principles apply across languages and frameworks. There’s a package for that When you’re just getting started building a new application in a new language and framework, everything is fresh and exciting — but it’s also difficult. How…

Quick reference and tutorial Written for Flutter 3.7. Every time I need to style text in Flutter, it always feels like reinventing the wheel. I’ve written about styled text before, but this will be a quick-reference article just related to using text spans. Text vs RichText vs Text.rich If your entire text uses the same…

A minimal example for a dialog or snackbar message My friend asked me today how to show an error message in the UI when making an HTTP request. It was kind of hard to explain in a chat message, so this article is for him…and for you if you have…

A short tutorial to make writing code a little faster I’m in the habit of scattering print statements around my code. This saves from having to step through a debugger to see what the code is doing. In the Dart language, it looks like this: print('message'); Everything but the message…

I always think it’s good to reflect on the meaning of life. Life is short, and it’s so easy to get caught up in making money and building your personal brand. What’s your motivation for programming? At the end of your life, what will it all mean? …

I originally meant to quietly post this as my Stack Overflow profile, but profiles there are only allowed 3000 characters, so here we are on Medium. Normally I don’t publicly write about sensitive topics that I know are controversial because I dislike controversy and I didn’t want any negative consequences…

Why is my IDE complaining at me? Perhaps you’ve seen one of these warnings in your IDE: Prefer relative imports for files in lib/. DO avoid relative imports for files in lib/. Messages like these come from Dart’s linting rules, which are warnings generated by dart analyze and communicated to…

Understanding the difference between deep and shallow copying When you create a collection in Dart, the contents of the collection are mutable. You can see that in the following example: final myList = ['sheep', 'cow']; myList.add('horse'); // [sheep, cow, horse] myList.remove('cow'); // [sheep, horse] myList[0] = 'goat'; // [goat, horse] …