Interview with Eric Windmill

So we joined today by Eric Gwynn Mill. He's a software engineer from Portland, Oregon. And he said to talk to us about his new book, which is called Flutter in Action and his experience as a mobile application developer. So I guess where we should start is tell us a little bit about your experience and who you are, where you've come from, and to give the audience a background of info about you.

Sure. Yeah, so as mentioned, I live in Portland, Oregon. I work, my day job is for a company called Greenbits, which we make software to help marijuana dispensaries run their businesses actually, which is interesting industry. So I work there because my team is working full-time rewriting our iOS app in Flutter.

And this is the second job I've had actually where that was pretty much my main role, rewriting native apps in Flutter. Previous to that, I was a web developer, mainly, only been an engineer for five years or so. So basically, when I started React was already the thing. So I did a lot of React and Vue and stuff previous to switching to Flutter and Dart.

So in terms of Flutter, could you give us, because I haven't really got any experience in Flutter other than every research I've done reading a book and looking into your website and your blog, could you just give us a quick summary on what Flutter is and how you find working with Flutter? Sure. So Flutter is a cross-platform mobile development SDK. It's actually more than that, because you can also deploy your apps to the web and to Mac OS to Windows to Linux to Chrome OS.

It really is like a, the ambition is truly a right once deploy everywhere for your mobile apps. So it's not, it started out as just a mobile app. So, but it's a little bit different than the other popular ones, such as React Native and Xamarin for a couple reasons, which we can get into. And Flutter is written in the Dart programming language, which is relatively unknown until Flutter kind of hit the scene.

And it is open-sourced, but owned and ran by Google. You know, the Flutter teams and Dart team basically work together all the time to improve both the language and the SDK together. That's pretty cool that is. I did some reading on this, Eric, and because I'm pretty new to app development.

And because I'm primarily a web developer, web designer, front-end sort of guy, that's me. And I said to myself, this year, I already want to get into app development. And then I just didn't know where to start. And this is one of the things, there's so much out there.

There's just so many, you know, different sort of like, you know, languages and frameworks and platforms that you can use to create your apps. And then, you know, you sent across the links and everything to Flutter, and I've been reading on it. And yeah, just blown me away. And it just sounds like the right solution for me to get involved.

And just what you just mentioned there, that is cross-platform. And it literally, you can create an app for anything up there in a single piece of code and not having to work with other frameworks, anything like that. That just makes sense. Yeah, it's pretty incredible that the, it's so, I have ran like the app that I work on every day at work as a Mac OS app, and it just worked.

And on top of that, it is actually really performant everywhere. It rivals the performance of True Native apps, which is all thanks to basically how the team, the Flutter team, you know, their vision was basically their screens everywhere, you know, between Internet of Things and everything. Like, why not? Why should there not just be a really powerful framework that runs everywhere?

And, you know, it started as a mobile, mobile only a couple years ago, but it's really developed into this, what they promised, which it literally runs everywhere. So it's pretty incredible. No, definitely. You mentioned that it runs everywhere and runs on the web.

Are there many examples of Flutter being used on the web and not just for mobile applications? So web support is fairly new. It's technically, I think, they still will say the web, Flutter for web isn't really ready for production. I think, you know, maybe it's in beta or something.

There are some example sites out there that I can send you some links to. There are not many, though. I think primarily what people are using it for right now is web apps that are meant to be run in a mobile web browser. That's not saying they don't run on your browser on your computer, but it doesn't because the UI is a little bit different.

When you run a mobile app on a desktop and a giant screen, it kind of feels funky. So I don't think it was really using that in production yet. So it's more along the lines of, like you said, React Native and Xamarin. How does Flutter differ from writing a native iOS app or a native Android app?

Sure. So it differs from those two specifically and mainly in the language. It's Dart is Excels being a very easy language to learn. And so it's a lot easier to jump into.

And also, I mean, I guess the best thing, the reason that it's really easy for web developers to get into mobile development with Flutter is because it abstracts away all of the native platform. I don't know if you all have ever opened up X-node and tried to deploy an iOS app, but it's a nightmare. And Flutter just abstracts all that away so well that you never really have to leave the Dart code. And part of that is because the entire framework, not the entire framework, but 90% of the framework is written in Dart.

And so it's just really, you just don't really ever have to mess with the native layer at all unless you want to specifically write a plugin to use some hardware. But the good news is there's already a bunch of libraries for all that stuff. So we rarely ever have to mess with the native layer itself. So yeah, it's really different than you're just writing Dart and not ever having to mess with the native platform itself.

Yeah, I'll be just looking on the Dart website as well, which is a Dart.dev. And there's some example code on the homepage, like, getting started, hello, all sorts of projects. And just looking at that, as someone who's never ever written any Dart or even looked into the language before, it seems fairly familiar and it feels fairly intuitive coming from a JavaScript background. It's a bit more strictly tight than JavaScript is, obviously.

But yeah, it seems clean and seems fairly intuitive. Yeah, there's an interesting thing about Dart. The reason is that it originally was written, like, 2011, that's a guess. But it's been almost a decade since it was originally written.

It was written specifically to run in the browser and take over JavaScript. But then Google realized we're never going to be able to get Safari and Mozilla and everybody to write a compiler or whatever, run time into their browsers. So they just kind of course-directed. Note that it must still be true.

So Dart semantically fits entirely inside JavaScript. Because you can actually write web apps in pure Dart and it'll transpile the JavaScript without you having to do anything and then you can just deploy web app. It's kind of forced to be catered to people who are familiar with JavaScript and other languages that aren't super feature-rich. It's not as complicated as Java because Java is huge and JavaScript and Dart are not.

Yeah, see, this is the selling point for me. The whole learning different concepts and languages and things like that, it's just too much going on. And with Dart, the fact that it follows closely with JavaScript is the main selling point for me. And it just makes everything a lot more easier.

And I actually got it all installed and set up on my Mac within five minutes. And I'm ready to go now. So I'm ready to start the tutorial later on this evening. But it's brilliant for everything you've said so far.

I'm loving it already. Yeah, I often feel like I should be a developer advocate for them or something because people, I'm not just saying this stuff because I wrote a book on it. It truly is just coming from a JavaScript background. When I started writing Dart, I was like, I found my place.

I love it. I love how easy languages, but it still has features like strong types, which I never thought I'd like, but now I can't look without them. Flutter is super easy to use. Truly, it's just the user expert, the developer experience that they have created for this platform is quite good.

What's the community support like for Dart? Because I was reading an article on NeverCode.io, on the blog and how old the article is. But they mentioned on there that Dart isn't well supported, as it's not common programming language. I think that might have been true in the past, but with Flutter, I mean, Flutter really brought Dart back to life for lack of better terms.

Flutter famously has over 5,000 issues on GitHub, but still, you can leave an issue and you'll get a response in a couple hours. Their community support is actually, I mean, Google just puts a lot into all their documentation That's the other thing. Google is solid with their documentation. You mentioned on your website that you were an early adopter in Flutter and you were involved in the Alpha a couple of years ago.

How's the language and the whole community developed over the past years from Alpha Station? How is that different to where we are now? Well, it's exploded. That's for sure.

In a very good way. There's one thing at my first job, when we were writing in Flutter and we had to write plugins for everything. We wanted to use the camera. We had to write our own plugin.

Maps, everything. Now they all exist, which is great. The language itself has also changed a lot. As of Dart 2.3, I think it is.

They're on like 2.7 now or something. But they made this massive shift to like, okay, this is now going to be a language that focuses on writing UI. The language itself has implemented a bunch of features that make it really easy to essentially write Flutter apps. The two biggest differences from two years ago is well, it basically all revolves around.

There are so many people doing it now that everything is easier. There's conferences and libraries for everything. There's Slack groups and a lot of really dedicated people. Actually, the community is one of everything because everyone's really excited.

It's not old enough where everyone's arguing yet. Everyone's still kind of rallying around the same technologies. I find it very easy community part of, very easy to help. That was not the case two years ago.

Two years ago, it was kind of like we just had to figure it out. Okay. It's hard to know what the underlying technologies are of certain apps. Are there any apps out in the world which we maybe have some experience with which are a bit of Flutter or Dart in the background?

Any big applications that you're aware of? There are some big ones, but they're kind of niche use cases. The biggest one is portions of Alibaba. That's not really a thing in the US.

I've never seen that app. I know a lot of Google apps like AdWords is written in Dart. A lot of the ad related apps that Google has are written in Dart. If they have mobile apps, I guess they're written in Flutter.

There's a page that's like Dart.dev slash showcase or something or Flutter.dev slash showcase. That lists a bunch, but I would be surprised if there's anything bigger than Alibaba because that's probably one of the biggest. How about your own personal projects? Do you have any apps out there in the world?

I don't have anything deployed to the stores. No. I have a lot of tutorials and stuff in which you will build apps, but nothing to play to the store. I'm just looking on the Flutter.dev showcase and it says that the New York Times has an app, Square, Google Assistant.

Yeah. Other companies that are using Flutter, Groupon, Alibaba, Capital One, eBay, there you go. Sonos. It looks like it's taking away in the background.

Yeah. The Google Assistant thing is really cool because it's like a proprietary piece of hardware, I guess. So it's running on, I guess Android, but it already does, but that's still pretty cool. I wasn't aware of that.

We're sponsored today by Manning Publications. We can get 40% off your first order. We're using the code PODInspect20 at checkout. That includes all print books, ebooks and video courses.

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Thank you to Manning for sponsoring our show. Okay, well, you've obviously written a book on the topic, so what exactly made you decide to write a book on flutter in the first place? And how did you know that you were in a position to be an authority on the topic? That's a good question.

The answer that's probably not as cool as people would like is that I already was writing blogs and stuff about it and Manning emailed me first. So the honest answer is I never even thought about writing a book, but I do really like writing and I've always, since I started programming, I was writing blogs and tutorials and stuff, even just for my own sake. So I've always liked writing, so it was a pretty easy choice for me. I think if it was a different subject, I would have had a big, big, big case of imposter syndrome, but I kind of knew, I mean, the framework was still an alpha when they reached out to me, because I kind of knew nobody really knows about this yet, so I really have an opportunity here to set the conversation rather than open myself up to write something that will get a lot of backlash.

So it was a pretty easy choice, I would say. What's involved in planning this? Because when you're writing a book like this, you've got so many different subject groups to talk about in different chapters and the structure and everything. How does that come about?

Did you have to speak to someone who's done it before? It was involved in getting this book put together. So a lot of that is thanks to Manning. They released a lot of technical books, so they were very good at guiding me.

And in fact, I think it's pretty easy to say that over half the work that went into writing this book was not actually writing, it was planning and everything else you're talking about. And I had basically a technical editor who helped me along the way. And it is a lot of work. The first thing I did was just brainstorm all the topics.

And it has to be whittled way down or else the book took a year and a half. And it's half the topics that I originally just brainstormed. So it takes a lot of people on the outside saying challenging me to decide what is really unnecessary and what can be taken out. And then the longest portion of all the work is the reviews.

And so they just have tons of technical reviewers and non-technical reviewers, and it just gets sent to 30 people and then they all come back with notes and rewrite all things and just goes back and forth forever. So it is. It's really bad. But that was definitely the worst part because when I started, I was like, this is awesome.

I'm going to fly through this. I'm going to have this book out in nine months. And then a little I know it took twice that long because the review process is, you know, but it's totally necessary. I'm glad I did it with a publisher.

There's times that I thought I could have just done this on my own and like, you know, self-publish it on Amazon. And after going through the process, I'm glad I did not do that. No, that's really cool that you've done it this way. Because you do see those ebooks out there, which I haven't gone through the stringent measures that your book obviously has.

It makes a whole lot of difference. But I can't wait to actually get into this properly. Because like I said earlier, I'm really looking forward to learning how to build apps. And I found in the platform I'm going to use in a language I want to use.

So for me, this is going to be ideal, definitely. You mentioned that Manning approached you to write this book. So I think of that. You weren't really thinking about writing a book at that time.

What was it? Was there a lot of pressure on you to up your skill set or do a lot of research and get things done to their schedule? Or what was the relationship been like with Manning? There wasn't.

So to much of their credit, there wasn't that much pressure. And they really let me, you know, they helped me and like maybe kept me on the rails, but they really didn't let me run with it. I have no horror stories like a lot of people do with publishers. I was very happy.

As far as upping my skill set, yes, I was incredibly nervous, specifically about the content, not necessarily about the writing style, but the content. The last thing I want to do is publish a book that just is wrong, you know, because it's not the if it's a blog that's fine, if it's wrong, I can go back and edit it. If it's a book, once it's out there, it's out there. So I spent, you know, I learned a ton that I thought I already knew and then I learned that I just was wrong just because every chapter, no matter what topic was, I had to do a lot of research.

And I talked to a lot of people on the flutter and dart teams who were very gracious and with their time and answered emails and had questions and stuff. So yeah, there's a lot of double checking my knowledge. Fantastic. And do you think you'll be releasing more books in the future?

I don't know. Honestly, I thought for the longest time, I thought no, but then once the book came out, I was like, I don't have anything to do anymore. So probably, yeah, because I immediately just started working on my my website that's just like flutter tutorials. So obviously I like to spend my weekends writing.

So why not? If you do write another book, what would it be about? I would like to do a book about dart itself. Cool.

And on like more advanced topics, it doesn't get too advanced in Dart, but yeah, I think Dart is really my true love of the Dart and flutter ecosystem. Nice. I noticed that on the cover of your book, you've got emblazon over the image, the letters me AP, which I believe is mobile enterprise application platform. No, that's right.

No, if you have a digital copy, I'm guessing that stands for Manning Early Access Program, I think. Well, the chances of that. What does that mean? What does it mean?

Yeah, that was a fantastic guess though. Okay, it seemed like a good fit, you know, having a mobile enterprise application platform. Yeah. Okay, we can scrap that bit.

So you just mentioned that you've got your flutter tutorials website, did you say? Yeah, so it's it's called flutterbyexample.com. So there's this kind of kind of get in the weeds, but there's a program called DartPad, which is at DartPad.dev, where you can just like, it's just like a little online text editor, we can write flutter and Dart code and run it right there. And you can also embed that in your own websites.

So it's just a list of. Similar to code bin, is that. Yeah, similar. So it's just like Dart and flutter tutorials, the Dart one that it's still being built, quite honestly, it's just there's a lot not in there, a lot of topics not covered yet, but it's just little bite-sized lessons where you can write and run code next, you know, right next to the lesson.

I'm still working on embedding the DartPad into a lot of it. And then the flutter section, that's a little harder to do because they're full apps. So it's just kind of walkthroughs of different topics. There's a basic app, which is just like the bare minimum, you need to know it's right UI and then it gets into like some different state management example apps and stuff like that.

So I'm slowly like your site now. Flutterbyexample.com, I'm just going through that. It's quite a lot there actually. It's really good.

Yeah. It's inspired by, I think it's JavaScript.info. They just have an example about literally every JavaScript topic you could think of. So yes.

But I've had this website for a long time. I just totally redid it, post-book. And I'm pretty sure this is why Manning found me and reached out to me because at the time I was, you know, this is one of the only places where people were writing about Flutter. So your book came out in January, I believe, is that right?

Yeah. I think that's when it was officially released. And how old has it been received so far? Have you had some feedback from the community?

Yeah. Honestly, I feel that it's been all really good. I'm sure there's bad reviews out there somewhere that I haven't seen and I'm not going to read. But the community itself, I got on Twitter and everything.

Everything's been really positive. I saw, for example, someone I don't know on Twitter say that they she bought a copy and then liked it so much that she bought a copy for her husband too. Like that is, that's where you think to be quite honest, I'm not, I didn't do this for the money. There's barely any money in publishing textbooks.

But so that kind of stuff is really, really gratifying, really rewarding to hear. And you're selling it in digital and physical copies, not you? Yep. That's a Manning.

That's on the Manning side of things. They have all that in place before. Well, you know, I've been speaking to Manning while we were setting up this interview as well. And they kind of gave us a few copies of the book to give away in a competition of our choosing.

So basically what we're going to be doing is, I think we've got five copies of your book, digital copies to give away. And we're going to be putting this, these are on Twitter as a little giveaway. So for the listeners out there, you can head over to Twitter account at Inspector Finn. And if you look at the pinned tweet at the time of this episode coming out, or you can check out the show notes for this episode.

I'll give you instructions on how to win that with a copy of that book. So yeah, hopefully you will get this into more hands and get people writing flutter and writing Dart into your community. It's got me on board. I'm definitely on board.

Yeah. Good. All right. Well, that's been good.

I think we've covered all of our topics that we had in mind. It definitely looks interesting. It looks like a good place for even beginners to start, would you say it's a good language for beginners to pick up if this was like maybe the first introduction to programming? Yes, I would.

Absolutely. I call it, I mean, Dart specifically, I kind of jokingly refer to as Java Lite. Because so it teaches a lot of the fundamentals, like typing, type systems and all that, but without really bogging you down and just like crazy syntax. Yeah, I mean, myself as a JavaScript developer and someone who's used React, one of my things that we're going to explore next was going to be React Native.

That would be the Swift in the past when I'm trying to do some iOS development. But like you said, Xcode is not the most forgiving app. And even Swift on is just generally, I couldn't quite get my head around Swift either. So I think it's definitely something that I'm going to try.

Obviously, K is already on board and hopefully a lot more people will be giving it a go after this as well. Yeah. I guess the last thing I'll say about flutter, specifically because I get the feeling that a lot of your listeners are the people that you're trying to reach our web developers and designers and stuff. Flutter is heavily influenced by React and that's from the words of the creators, not from me.

So the mental model is quite the same. It's a lot different writing it, but if you know how to write React, you will be able to jump right in fairly easily. Okay. Yeah.

No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. I think most of our listeners are in some sort of web development, whether it's front end or just designers. And I know we've got some JavaScript fans on board as well.

So this could definitely be right up there street. So what we'll do is we'll put a bunch of links into the show notes where you can find out more. But before we wrap up, could you maybe share a bit more about web people can find about you? Obviously, how they can support you?

Obviously, by your book, but if there's any other ways, yeah, do that now. Sure. I think the book is the only thing I have that costs money, but you don't have to buy it if you don't want. The only other than that, flutter by example is all free.

So if you'd rather drive dive in there without spending money, do that. And you can find me the only place I really am on the internet is Twitter, it's just at Eric Windmill. So I'm pretty active. So come hang out digitally.

Yeah, brilliant. Any final words, Kay, for me? Yeah, I'm just gonna let people know if you're getting involved with that development, this is probably going to be the best place to start. If you haven't looked elsewhere, you're not getting involved in any other options that are out there, like React and anything like that, definitely have a look into this because I'm new to it.

And I've literally just got it installed and set up on my Mac to be five minutes to get it up and running. And I'm ready to go with tutorials. So highly recommended. I haven't even got anywhere with it yet.

And it just sounds so promising. Everything about it just sounds so good. And it's exactly what I was looking for. So, you know, bigger heads up for Eric, what he's done with this flutter.

Yeah. And if there's any listeners out there who are already using flutter or using Dart, reach out to us, it's in spec and reach out to Eric and let us know what you're building and how you're finding things and what you think of the book, if you've already read it. And just remember, if you haven't already got a copy, you can read a copy. But if you can't win it, then you should definitely go and buy it because it looks like a very useful resource for anyone getting excited in this.

All right. So we normally end our shows with some recommendations. Just anything that you find cool is anything that you'd like to shout out, Eric. We could come to you at the end of the whole thing at that.

Yeah, I have something. So like I said, I developed our podcast and lately, I've been obsessed with the Revolutions podcast. It's just so the third season is about the French revolution and it's 55 episodes long, each one between half hour and an hour. So if you enjoy history and you want to know the most minute details about all the really bad moments in history, such that are all revolutions, it is incredibly interesting and fun to listen to and easy to listen to.

So that's my recommendation. Cool. Okay. What have you got for us?

Well, I got not much really. I mean, I've been ill for the last two weeks. So I haven't really been doing anything apart from working and designing and building and stuff like that. But I did get back into gaming after about a week or two away from it.

And I got involved with a Call to Duty Modern Warfare's Warzone, which is their latest edition, their Battle Royal Edition. They just launched literally a couple of days ago. So all the gamers out there, it's quite a lot of web developers and developers in general who like a bit of gaming, definitely get involved with it. It's called Warzone and it's a modern warfare quality and it's brilliant.

150, 200 people on one map. Wow. Yeah. And they've got two different game modes in there.

So you've got one, which is like a loot, where you just go around just grabbing money, killing your enemies and taking their money. And the hell you got to all come down and take the money and keep it safe for you kind of thing. And then you've got the other one where the map gets smaller and smaller and the last team left wins. So yeah, brilliant, brilliant concept.

I was going involved with that. I've been playing that recently. That's my show recommendation. Okay.

Cool. I'm going to recommend a series on Netflix. It's called Ultra Carbon. I've only seen season one yet, but season two has just been released a couple of weeks ago.

So I caught up with season one before that one got released. And yeah, it's really cool. It's a sci-fi series. It's basically set a few hundred years in the future.

It's set on Earth and humanity's got a point where we can separate our bodies and consciousness. And when people die, they don't die. They just basically get their consciousness implanted into a new body, which they call it a sleeve. So they're like interchangeable cases, like covers.

So you could start your life. You could be born as a male from France or whatever. And then when you die, you can get put into a child's body again, or you could put into a female's body or depending on how much money you've got, you can upgrade your body at any point to someone of importance. That's crazy.

Yeah. It's an interesting series. I've been thinking about watching that. And so I think now I'm now in salt.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And because there's some characters throughout the series as well who change bodies. And there's an old grandmother, who's this lady, her grandmother's consciousness gets put into this old biker, biker guy's body. It's just such an interesting concept.

And the whole series sort of follows a murder case, which they're trying to solve. So yeah, check it out. Season one has just been out for a while. Season two is on Netflix and now as well.

And it is a continuation, I believe. So it's worth watching from this beginning. Cool. Yeah, so check it out.

So yeah, those will be in the show notes as well. Yeah, we've just about done this. So yeah, thanks again, Eric, for joining us, letting us know a little bit about your world. You can find more on your website, ericwinmill.com.

And also check out flutterbyexample.com. And like I said, all the links that we mentioned today will be in the show notes. And don't forget to check out Twitter for the competition on how you could win copy of Eric's book. And we'll take it from there.

That's all. All right. Thanks for having me. No problem.

Apples. Thanks. Thank you for listening to today's show. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player and feel free to drop us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.

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