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…

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. It was a YouTube video, but I say listened and not watched because I…

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…