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] …

The five-step process and how it relates to software engineering I recently listened to Elon Musk’s interview from Tim Dodd of the Everyday Astronaut as Elon gave him a guided tour of the SpaceX Starbase site. …

A guide to using the mailer package When an important event happens on your Dart server, it would be nice to get a notification. One way to do that is to send yourself an email. This article will cover how to do that using the mailer package. You’ll create a…

Comparing plain old Dart, JSON, YAML, and environment variables By now you’re used to setting configuration options in pubspec.yaml, but what if you want to define your own config values and read them inside your app? How do you do that? I’ll give you an overview of some options in…

A full step-by-step tutorial If you’re only playing short audio clips in your app, then generally a simple audio player plugin will work. However, for longer audio forms like music or podcasts, this is often insufficient. Let’s say you start playing a podcast but then leave this app to check…

Navigating null safety with no implicit casts or implicit dynamic types Switching to Dart 2.12 with sound null safety was overall pretty painless…except for one thing: All my JSON to object conversions broke, and it was super difficult to figure out how to make the errors go away. In this…

Programming is difficult. Although it’s not so hard to get the Counter app running, becoming an expert at a framework like Flutter and a language like Dart takes time, probably years. So in this article, I’ll give some advice to help you get to the next level. There are a…