Hi, folks!! The rainy season is finally in full swing, how are you doing? This is Shohei (@heyhey1028), Flutter engineer at Money Forward.
June is packed with conferences. In this context, Money Forward was a gold sponsor of FlutterNinjas Tokyo 2024, a global conference dedicated to Flutter, held on 13 and 14 June 2024.
What is FlutterNinjas Tokyo?
FlutterNinjas is an international tech conference dedicated to Flutter, held for the first time this year. It was conducted entirely in English, and was attended by speakers and visitors from more than 10 countries, both domestic and international.
In total, more than 130 visitors gathered to listen to 17 sessions over two days.
Money Forward booth
At the Money Forward booth, we gave out quizzes asking visitors to guess the following two items.
- Our apps that use Flutter amongs apps introduced at the booth
- Percentage of our global members in Money Forward
Those who answered the quizzes received the familiar (?) coin chocolates with a cute pouch bag with our logos on it.
As expected from an international conference, software developers of various nationalities visited and answered the quiz.
Talk sessions
The 17 sessions featured speakers on a variety of topics, including animation, game development and generative AI and more. Here are some of the sessions that caught the attention of the participating members.
Stop treating Accessibility as an Afterthought
The first is the talk about Accessibility given by Manuela Rommel who has also starred in Google’s official youtube program “Observable< Flutter >” and talked about implementing accessibility on Flutter.
The session started with an overview of accessibility and carefully explained through the steps to implement it to actual flutter projects.
The session included detailed introduction of classes and fields, such as controlling the reading order using sortKey in Semantics and BlockSemantics to block semantics, how to debug using showSemanticsDebugger, how to test Semantics, and more.
Reason for attention: With the revised Disability Discrimination Law coming into force in Japan from April 2024, there is growing momentum for accessibility support. Money Forward is no exception and is working diligently to improve the accessibility of its apps. MoneyForward members listened intently to what was said in this session to accelerate our accessibility support in Flutter.
Flutter Add-to-app: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Next up was a session by Marcin Chudy from LeanCode on Add-to-app, the ability to embed Flutter into existing iOS and Android apps. He shared his team’s experience and lessons learned from two years of developing with Add-to-app.
Specific use cases and lessons/tips for dealing with complex screen transitions, UI, network communication and CI, such as using multiple FlutterEngine were presented.
Reason for attention: We use add-to-app in some of our Money Forward apps, and we gained a lot of practical knowledge to actively use it in the future. We were able to ask questions and advice from the speakers first thing in the “Ask the Speaker” section after the session.
Shots like a master and a disciple (LOL).
Riverpod 3.0, the preview
The last session was the highlight of the event, by Remi Rousselet, the creator of Provider and Riverpod, a state management package used in many projects.
Remi was visiting Japan for the first time to speak for this event.
He talked about Riverpod ver 3.0, which is currently under development. Session introduced topics such as the migration of StateProvider and StateNotifier to the Legacy package, offline cache using local storage, and UI processing that supports POST and other changes to the server (side-effect).
A preview release is planned for this summer, with an official release planned towards the end of the year.
Reason for attention: Riverpod has been very helpful for our apps, and this was a good opportunity to catch up on the direction the package is heading in. It has allow us to take a fresh look at the current implementation. Of course we want to challenge new features, but we also want to improve our current implementation based on what was shared.
A quick photo with Remi, who was as popular as an idol during the conference.
Results
The booth was visited by about 60 people over the two days. Meaning, almost half of the visitors were introduced about MoneyForward and MoneyForward’s commitment to Flutter! Yay!!👏👏👏👏🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
The booth was run by a cross-section of teams working with Flutter across the company. During the conference, we were able to exchange information about our development and problems that we face everyday. The members had a stimulating two-day, both inside and outside MoneyForward.
We hope to continue to actively communicate MoneyForward’s commitment to Flutter in the future, while applying the knowledge and insights gained from this conference to our projects✊
We’re hiring!
Money Forward is looking for mobile engineers!
Engineers with Flutter experience are also welcome!
https://hrmos.co/pages/moneyforward/jobs?category=1707296059459596293
If you want to take on the challenge of developing in a global environment, we are looking forward to hearing from you!