This week I would like to talk about my capstone project which is designed using flutter and the dart programming language. Both of which are open source and as such will be using them for the open source course offered here at Oregon State University. The name of our team is “The Help Save Craigslist team” and our job is to design and deliver a cross platform version of the classic Craigslist experience, albeit with a modern twist and a user experience more inline with what today’s standards. We are a team with a solid foundation in Flutter. Collectively a majority of our experience is thanks to the Mobile Development course offered at OSU. However, some of us, myself included, have not utilized Amazon S3 or the other tools required for a few of the features in the project requirements.
We just had our first stand up on Wednesday afternoon this week. Since then I have spent several hours reading the flutter and dart documentation to refamiliarize myself with the syntax, tools, and other nuances of the framework and language. Additionally, I spent some time re watching lecture material from the Oregon state mobile dev course as the lecture videos explained many of the flutter concepts in detail. However, I also had to supplement with some YouTube tutorials as well. After feeling more confident in my working memory of flutter and dart I then decided to dive right in.
I first began with the setup of the local environment. Had to make sure my installation of git was proper, it was, and git bash was working as expected. Later on I figured out that I did not have an ssh key configured for GitHub (click for instructions) so I had to go ahead and configure that through the command line. Make sure to check if you already have any existing ssh keys.
Afterwards I Downloaded flutter using the command line and ran flutter doctor. Installed all the necessary applications (Android studio, vscode, chrome, flutter, etc.) and set up the mobile phone emulator in android studio so I can test the flutter application. Final step was to clone the repository to my local machine, ensure libraries are up to date, and that the craigslist app works on my computer. Done and done.
Finally decided to attempt making the user interface changes for the log in screen and I ended up re writing the screen three times. Spent too much time trying to do too many things so in the end I scrapped everything and just committed a decent rough draft that I can implement/iterate on further at a later date. That is the proper way to do things but I was in a hurry and overestimated my flutter skill, partly thanks to the mobile course I took one year ago, ha. No worries, the plan is to stick with the build in functionality and Widgets(kind of like standard library methods) that flutter natively provides while I ramp up. In the meantime I am super excited to keep working on this project with my teammates!
