October 13, 2024

Add Spatial Capabilities in SQLite

A few days ago, I wanted to add spatial features to my backend. I wanted to store the GPS positions of users and return the closest people to them (like a dating app).

Usually, people use PostgreSQL and PostGIS, an extension that enables spatial capabilities, but that’s not something I want. My backend is using SQLite because I’m not expecting more than 10 users a day.

Fortunately, there is an extension that we can use called Spatialite.

October 10, 2024

Write An Application With Getx

I wrote an article where I analyzed the source code of GetX. I found many things for which I wouldn’t normally use GetX in any of my projects.

But, in my Reddit post, some people said I was wrong; they were more productive and delivering faster, etc. They argued that because I haven’t used it, I can’t judge, and my opinion is useless.

That’s why I’m going to write a small project with version ^5.0.0-release-candidate-9.2.1.

October 9, 2024

Humble Opinion About Getx

GetX is the first package on pub.dev when sorted by most likes. It has more than 14,000 likes and more than 10,000 stars on GitHub. However, most of the Flutter community will say that it’s a very bad package and it shouldn’t be used.

I was wondering if it was true or not. Maybe all the community is wrong. It’s the reason I cloned the GetX repo to understand the code and find out what’s bad.

August 14, 2024

How I automate my video creation

Last week, I was thinking about starting a YouTube channel. I wanted to share my knowledge about Python and Flutter. I’m not an expert, but I think I can have something to share.

The thing is I’m very lazy. I’m willing to make videos, but I really don’t want to spend hours writing a script, recording my voice, editing the video, etc… I don’t really know how to do all that stuff, and neither want to learn 4 new software programs. I made my decision: I’m going to let the machine do most of the job for me.

May 18, 2024

The journey of writing a new package

A few days ago, I was looking for a way of displaying a map of the world in my app and be able to select a country on the map. Surprisingly, I haven’t found one meeting my needs (I haven’t searched a lot though).

Most of the packages giving you the opportunity to draw a map are packages using third parties like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap/Leaflet. They are powerful solutions but you will need to pay to render the map and what’s more, it cannot select a special area.

May 18, 2024

Write an audio metadata reader in Dart

A while ago, I tried to build my own music player. Flutter is great for this use case because of its multiplatform capabilities.

What do we need to build a good music player? A library to read audio metadata. The metadata is information about the artist’s name, the album’s name, the track number, the length, the release year, the cover image… Tons of very useful information we must display to the user.

May 18, 2024

Optimize a Flutter web build

A few weeks ago, I was working on porting my Flutter app to the web. It’s a very straightforward operation. I just needed to add the web platform, build, and done! Then, I remembered that a lot of people were complaining about Flutter’s web build. The main complaint is that the app (or web app) has to download a huge JavaScript file the first time a user loads the app. This JavaScript file main.dart.js weighs 2.5MB at least!