How I earned my first $500 within a month of learning Flutter
Intro
I am a pre-final year student at NIET, Gr. Noida, India pursuing B.Tech in Electronics and communication stream but my heart beats for Computer science. In love with computers since 12, earlier was games now it’s development then why didn’t I chose the computer science field, its a long failure story for another day.
I started with web development in my sophomore and built a college society’s website, where students can watch and register for events and see what’s happening in the college, then built my personal portfolio website and then built a project solving real-world Indian government problem showcased it on the platform of Smart India Hackathon which was rejected in the final stage of the competition.
You might be wondering but why did I switch to Flutter?
How did I bump into Flutter?
It is an interesting story, me and my friend were discussing something in his hostel’s room, we got a revolutionary idea of transforming offline shopping as amazon go but at a fraction of cost, in the utter excitement, we jumped upon deciding what tools should be used for development, how to monetize and how to get it market-ready in few months.
I started learning Flutter at night and started development at day, we chose it because it is the fastest way to develop apps for mobile platform but in the over-excitement, we didn’t research the idea properly and after 2 weeks of hustle and class bunks the bomb dropped and my dream of toppling bill gates from the richest man charts was destroyed in split seconds, we were introduced to a startup that was doing the same thing better executed than we could have ever thought since 3 years. We went to the cafeteria for the condolences and I came back to my room and got back to my life which was computers.
The 2-week hustle made me fell in love with Flutter, everything is a widget in Flutter, the navbar, the appbar, the icon, the button, even the text is a widget, text style no surprise a widget. In a nutshell, In Flutter anything that is a view or contributes to a property of the view is a widget. This just makes the development of UI so easy, fast and relaxing. Widgets are like components(for web-devs) that are also reusable and comes pre-tailored out of the box and can be even tailored easily to one’s need with minimal code. More than widgets the underlying language dart makes things more interesting and lovely about the framework. Dart is object-oriented, type-safe, null safe, compiles code ahead of time(AOT) or just in time(JIT) depending on the need and it is easy to learn.
So I continued learning Flutter leaving the web stranded like an old toy, developed some clone projects in it, some sample apps with different design pattern and when I felt 70% confident in my skills, I jumped on searching for an internship to work on real-world problems and learn team etiquettes.
The Search Begins
”Searching an internship is easy, but searching for a good one is javascript(messy😜)”
— Anonymous
In India, it’s tough to find a good one that also pays some stipend. Our country knows best juggad in every department, thus some people think students as free coding laborers and gets their projects done at no real cost exploiting fearful and young college coders.
Personal experience found 80% of internships description as fake and not worth applying on Internshala, rest were seeking interns who were in the final year, sadly at that time was in my sophomore.
Thus applied at 23 firms from Internshala, the Flutter demand at that point was not like React or any other web framework got contacted by 8, landed 3 interviews, got rejected, as they thought being in sophomore I wouldn’t be able to put full-time efforts in the work.
The COVID-19 situation affected the college’s schedule and summer breaks were eradicated, thus creating more friction in recruiter’s minds, then I got a call from my mentor, Mr. Himanshu Shankar, also the founder of Civil Machines Technology who helped us develop the SIH project, asking if I would like to work as a Research Flutter Intern at Civil machines, to which without thinking I said yes, I would love too.
After all the formalities I had my virtual on-boarding and started the 3-month roller coaster ride full of learning, self-realization and what not.
Check my Internship experience
Takeaways
My story is very similar to an average Joe, it doesn’t have anything special about it. The only purpose of writing this is to help someone who thinks learning everything about something is necessary to work in the real world, be confident about your skills and trust the process, you will figure out everything in the way.
For anyone who is in the early days of Flutter or want to start learning, the following resources can give you a head-start.
- Angela Yu Udemy course
- Flutter crash course by Academind
- The net ninja Flutter course
- Flutter official documentation
- If you are not a docs person, become one but you can always start from Angela Yu course highly recommended for beginners.
- In the learning process don’t put much emphasis on searching for best practices while doing things the first time, make things work then improvise and go for the best practices.
- Don’t waste time searching the best state management library while you are starting, there is none for every situation, every library has pros and cons for the particular case. Start with the provider, then learn bloc or riverpod.
If you like my story, 10 claps will make my day😍 and a share would help me build back my dream of toppling world’s richest, now Jeff Bezos 😉.
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshkc99/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/harshkc99
