I cannot think of any use of union types in Flutter, if I'm being honest.
I'm not much of a TypeScript developer, but if I understand it correctly, it works quite well there because TS is more structural, where a union is more of a representation of the fields shared by two (or more) types.
I feel like Flutter/Dart just works in a bit of a different manner compared to TS/React Native, and it shouldn't be looked at from the same angle.
Swift and Kotlin also do not have union types, and mobile developers somehow manage without them :D
Thank you for the kind words and the feedback (｡◕‿‿◕｡)
Actually, the transition from the searchbar is made using the animations package. Container transform, to be more specific: https://pub.dev/packages/animations
Regarding selectable text: I didn't want the titles to be selectable; instead, I aimed for the actual text provided by the companies to be selectable. However, there's one annoying bug with the SelectableText widget - in shorter texts, the widgets leave an empty space (one character long) before the actual content of the widget. I couldn't figure out how to bypass that, so I left it as a normal Text widget. If you place a SelectableText on top of or below a normal Text widget, the first one does not appear centered at all. Just one of those quirky Flutter things :)
For dropdowns, I use the Dropdown2 package - much, much better and more customizable compared to the standard, Flutter one.
I considered Riverpod for state management, but Provider seemed more appealing to me at that time, probably due to its simplicity. Someday I may switch to the Bloc approach just to see and get a grasp of how the big boys handle this.
For me, it will always be Twitter :(
The slow loading issue might be because you are based in Australia, and Cloudflare is taking some time to process the "connection". Sometimes it even blocks users from certain countries or regions. I don't know exactly how it works behind the scenes; it's completely not my cup of tea. But you're right, adding something like "This is taking longer than usual..." would be a great addition.
Honestly, I learned everything from YT tutorials - just the basic stuff to get a grasp of how those infamous widget trees work. Most of my learning came from a guy called Mitch Koko. The official Flutter channel is also excellent.
When it comes to libraries, I would recommend sticking with built-in features for tasks like image loading or parsing. This actually works quite well, and there's no need to delve into external solutions, especially for prototyping. Dart's factory methods come in handy for parsing JSON from an API, and the internal HTTP package is also very well done (for more advanced stuff there is a package called dio).
The main challenge lies in state management. Be sure to choose the right external stuff. The 'bloc' package seems to be the state of the art at the moment, but if you prefer something simpler, Provider is the way to go.
The need for other libraries may become apparent after spending some time on the project.
Flutter is a great choice for quick prototyping. You can build something in a matter of minutes. Many people prefer this way over launching Figma, which says a lot :)
It's really hard to compare both dev markets. In Europe, salaries varies a lot depending on the country.
There is Switzerland where average dev can earn up to 120k CHF (~ $130k) [1], and on the other hand we have Germany with average of 60k EUR (~ $70k) [2]. The UK is rather similar: 60k GBP (~ $82k) [3]. To have a perspective, we can also add Poland to the list: 240 000 PLN (~ $61k) [4].
As you can see, it's not that simple, especially when you take into consideration the tax rates and costs of living in each country.
It is doable and in some countries like Switzerland even a common practice to offer an 80% - 100% workload (if you look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/ or any other tech job board you will notice it occurs quite often)
The problem is that an 80% workload for companies also means 80% of the salary which makes sense if someone wants to work part-time, but it's not the implementation of a 4-day work week idea.
Personally, I believe a 4-day work week will sooner or later be a standard, simply because Developers (including myself) waste a lot of their daily time and by having a constrained time-frame they will also be more efficient. In the same time (hopefully) management might reduce the number of meetings forced onto the Dev team.
From my experience, Switzerland is definitely better compared to countries like, let's say, Germany, in almost every area of life - standard of living, salaries, closeness to the nature, taxes, healthcare - you name it.
Average salaries for devs :
- Germany: 50k EUR / year;
- Switzerland: 95k CHF / year.
Of course, it depends on the specific canton/city/town when you want to settle down, but you need to take to account taxes as well. In Germany, they will tax you pretty heavily, around 50%, and Swiss taxation is ~30%, more or less.
Of course those are rough estimations, but you get the point.
In terms of costs of living, it is expensive, especially if you want to live in Zurich, but for a dev earning ~100k it won't be that much of an issue. Of course, you can choose a smaller town and cut down all expenses in half :slight_smile:
The main differentiator between existing boards and our site is the transparency: each company has to provide details like: salary, tech stack, all dev methodologies that they use (are they doing CI/CD, writing integration tests, etc) and so on.
Presently we are polishing the code base, trying to get some attention from the local market, grinding through social media and talking with various companies.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, complaints and insights, feel free to drop some comments down below :)
Swift and Kotlin also do not have union types, and mobile developers somehow manage without them :D