Introduction
For me, 2022 was a year of growth and learning as I delved deeper into the world of Flutter development. In addition to building apps with Flutter, writing about Flutter has been a great way to share my knowledge and experiences with the community.
In this blog post, I will share some personal highlights and accomplishments from the past year. I hope that, whether you're an experienced Flutter developer or just getting started, this post will inspire you to continue learning and growing with this incredible framework! So, let's dive in and take a look at my year with Flutter and the Dartling blog!
Accomplishments
The Dartling blog grows
In 2022, I published a total of 11 blog posts. That's almost one blog post a month, which is very close to the goal I set for me. While I would have liked it to be more, it's more than I expected, and it's also 550% more posts compared to 2021! I started the Dartling blog in May 2021, but only managed to publish 2 articles about using Flutter with Supabase.
Here are the top 3 Dartling blog posts of 2022:
And below are some stats for the year:
If you're curious about the huge spike in views and visitors in September, that's the main topic of the next section.
4 Articles in 4 Weeks
Thanks to the 4 Articles in 4 Weeks Hashnode Writeathon, I was motivated enough to keep blogging consistently for a month, publishing one post per week. Participating in this writeathon was one of the highlights of my year in blogging, as it resulted in having two of my four articles written featured on Hashnode.
As a result of the articles being featured, Dartling became more visible and resulted in a huge amount of new followers. I started the year with less than 10 followers on Hashnode, and the blog is now at over 200! I would highly recommend joining any contests, hackathons or writeathons on Hashnode if you can.
Growing my first Flutter app
Two and a half years ago, I published my first ever mobile app built with Flutter, Timelog. Since then, I added a lot more features and made many improvements to it. Timelog has had almost 20k downloads in 2022, and that's only from the Play Store! Though it's not as popular on the App Store (yet), with just a little less than a thousand downloads total.
Publishing my second Flutter app
Because of the lockdown rules introduced during the pandemic in early 2022, I had a lot of free time in the evenings while at home. I spent a lot of time building a second Flutter app, Flow, an expense tracking app. I share more details, from design to implementation to publishing, in this post.
Supabase Launch Week 6 Hackathon
During the Supabase Launch Week 6 Hackathon, I decided it was time to brush up on my Supabase skills and build something using Flutter and Supabase. By the end of the hackathon, I had built a real-time, multiplayer quiz game, Supaquiz, which you can play here. You can play on your own or host a game and play with friends. You can also check out the source code here.
Supaquiz won the best Flutter project category! I am planning to share some more on how I built it in a separate blog post soon.
Lessons learned
Stay consistent
One of the biggest lessons I learned during the past year is the importance of staying consistent. For both writing and app development, I found that the key to making meaningful progress was to set a regular schedule and stick to it.
Keep up-to-date
Another important lesson I learned is the value of keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in the Flutter ecosystem. Flutter keeps growing, and there is always something new to learn and explore. Through newsletters, Reddit and Twitter, it's easy to stay informed about the latest features, new packages, or interesting projects built with Flutter.
Goals for the future
I have several goals that I hope to achieve in 2023. One of my main goals is to continue writing about Flutter on a (more) regular basis and contribute to the Flutter community. I plan to write at least two blog posts per month, sharing my experiences and insights with other Flutter developers, and improving my skills and knowledge.
In addition to writing, I also hope to continue growing my existing Flutter apps, adding new features (and maybe even doing some marketing) to make them even better. And perhaps I might even release a third Flutter app!
Wrapping up
All in all, it's been a productive year, but as always there is room for improvement! Balancing writing, and building personal projects on top of a full-time job can be quite the challenge! However, I am excited to continue exploring Flutter and getting a stronger and deeper understanding of the framework.
If you have any particular topics or aspects of Flutter development you'd like to see more of in mind, please let me know in the comments! Do you have any plans or goals that have to do with writing or Flutter for the new year?
Keep building, writing, or both! Happy new year!
Cover image generated by OpenAI's DALL-E.
