When you develop an app you usually do it locally, then deploy it to a test environment, and once QA signs off you go ahead and release it to the production environment. It is usually the case that the API, the app runs on, also has a test and a production environment. So, how can […]
Using StandardJsonPlugin with built_value for Flutter
Or why do I get type ‘_InternalLinkedHashMap’ is not a subtype of type ‘Iterable’ in type cast error when deserializing json objects using built_value. TL;DR jump to the solution. The setup When using built_value in a project, what I find useful is to use the json to built_value tool in order to create my model […]
Flutter Redux using BLoC
State management is a huge issue for the Flutter community. Coming from an Angular background I got accustomed to using Redux and therefore it made sense for me to follow the same pattern in Flutter. I also used services to encapsulate business logic and expose the state to the UI. It was a good exercise […]
Reusing i18n strings for IT testing in Flutter
It is not uncommon to check the text of some widgets when doing integration testing. It is usually done so, in order to be assured that the user will receive the appropriate feedback before and/or after certain actions. TL;DR Check out the full example here, but I would suggest you keep reading, it will not […]
Smart / Dumb Components in Flutter (Forms)
In another article, I laid out a way to implement, in flutter, the presentation/container pattern. But my example was super simple; to show a list of items in a ListView. But there are other more complex cases than that. Let’s take forms for example. Component characteristics Let’s remember some of the characteristics that the presentation […]

Migrating a mobile database in flutter (SQLite)
Database migration is a headache for any developer working in an application with a non-trivial state. Whenever the state structure changes it must be depicted in the underlying database as well. Coming from a Java background I am used to having libraries to help me out with this problem, such as flyway or liquibase. So, […]

Smart / Dumb Components in Flutter
The un-opinionated nature of flutter gives room to apply almost any pattern you want. Coming from an angular background I am used to working with the Smart Components (Container) and Dumb Components (Presentation) strategy, in almost all my projects. So it felt natural for me to attempt to apply this paradigm to my flutter projects. […]

5 Things That Demotivate Developers
The holy grail for any team leader is to have her team motivated so that it maintains a high level of performance. But demotivation can occur and it is not that uncommon to occur even in the highest performing teams. The reasons why a developer gets demotivated can be numerous. What follows is five of the […]
Reverse engineering a middleware Part 1
There came a time that I had to write a middleware-like application using just es6. So, instead of re-inventing the wheel I decided to ‘borrow’ the api of a very well known middleware framework, namely expressjs. First things first, went to the Getting Started page and grabbed the ‘hello world’ example: Let’s focus on the initialization part: It would […]
Seamless pushing to multiple remote git repositories.
A couple of years ago we had a need in the team to keep 2 remote repositories in sync. A couple of services, devop scripts and other tools were evaluated, but we ended up using the following little hack to treat both remotes as one. This hack will not work with proper git commands, hence […]