Blazebrain, teaching Flutter live

Context

Blazebrain is my own name for the teaching and writing I do outside work. In 2023 and 2024 it was mostly live sessions: five recorded on YouTube in September 2023, then five more through the first half of 2024, two as X Spaces and three as Google Meet workshops with a guest each.

Problem

Most Flutter material assumes a fast laptop, a stable connection and an English-speaking Stack Overflow. A lot of the developers I know in Nigeria have one of the three. What they wanted was someone to walk through one thing properly, live, and take questions.

Constraints

Evenings and weekends, around two jobs and a conference.

One topic per session, small enough to finish and answer questions in about an hour.

The two Spaces left replays on X, which need an account to play. The three Meet workshops were not recorded, so they live in people’s notes. The 2023 sessions are on YouTube.

Decisions and trade-offs

Teach the thing under the framework, not the framework. The first 2023 session was environment variables using Dart’s own compile-time defines instead of a package, because the package was what everyone reached for and the native route was simpler. The debugging session was DevTools, not print statements. The trade-off is that these are less searchable topics than “build a to-do app”. They are also the ones people kept asking about afterwards.

Bloc in two halves. One session on the basics, one on repositories and data sources, a day apart, because the second half is where people get stuck and it does not fit in an hour with the first.

Bring the communities together (27 April 2024). The Nigerian Flutter scene had several communities that mostly did not talk. I hosted a hangout on Spaces and got five of them into one call. It was cut short by technical issues, and it was still the session with the least code and the most disagreement in it.

Say when a topic is worth arguing about. The animations session was titled “Necessity or Inessential?” on purpose. Half the value of a live session is disagreeing with the room.

What was hard

Keeping a live session useful for both the person who has shipped three apps and the person who installed Flutter last week. The answer was to pick a narrow topic and go deep, and let the questions widen it.

Consistency. Ten sessions in ten months, all live, all announced with a card I made myself.

Result

Ten sessions. Five recordings on YouTube, linked below. Five live sessions in 2024: Flutter animations on a Space (27 January), animation with Rive on Meet (22 March), the community hangout on a Space (27 April), asynchronous data with http and Dio on Meet (4 May), and the art of debugging on Meet (22 June).

The same habit, explaining one mechanism plainly to a mixed room, is how I write the case studies on this site.