Last week, our team attended the Flutter Firebase Festival 2023, also known as F3, held in Prague. In this post, we will share insights from our favorite talks. A big thank you to Invertase for organizing such an event!
Michal
The talk that caught my attention the most was Creating realtime bus displays in limited time by Fré Dumazy. It was about creating an app that runs on displays in shuttle buses in Bruges. What was mesmerising for me was that they were forced by an extremely an tight deadline (2 weeks) to look for the simplest solutions possible. That is not something we usually do, because as technical people we are attracted by solutions that are technologically beautiful, unnecesarily complex, hyped and more often than not completely unnecessary.
Their solution was a web app made in Flutter, hosted on Firebase. By using a web app, they’ve avoided the need to distribute and update a mobile app. They chose Flutter because they were familiar with it, and Firebase because they were already using it for the driver’s app. They didn't even bother changing the URL to a custom domain. To separate the individual displays, they pass the bus license plate number as a URL parameter. The displays are connected to a Raspberry Pi running FullPageOS, which is essentially Chromium running in full screen mode.
Yes, there are some rough edges with that solution that may show up in the future, but this talk served as a reminder to me that sometimes the simplest solution can be good enough, and we shouldn't overcomplicate things.
Honza
The first talk of day 2 – Pushing Flutter to the Extent: Beyond Mobile, Desktop and Web by Roman Jaquez was truly something special to me. We use Flutter today mostly on mobile platforms, sometimes on desktop or web, but what more can we do with it? I found it interesting when Roman spoke about people comparing Flutter to other multiplatform technologies like React Native and when he argued that it’s not fair, since Flutter is in a league of its own. And it’s true — have you seen another cross-platform technology running on mobile, desktop, web, Toyota car panels, or built-in cash registers? (I have also seen Flutter rendered in a terminal → ~25:30).
Roman demonstrated what he made with affordable hardware from AliExpress; things like round displays and flexible displays. He showcased his creation with a round display in his jacket, which was a clever idea and a great demonstration of the possibilities of wearable technology.
The final example was a vision for a restaurant app. In this app, users select ingredients for a burger and then track their order as it travels to the kitchen. The route from the table to the kitchen would be shown on monitors on the restaurant walls. Each monitor would run Flutter and display a continuous movement of the order. Roman even demonstrated a prototype of this by showing approx. 10 screens placed next to each other to simulate the path of an order, and it worked incredibly well! It would certainly provide an interesting restaurant experience, I must say!
Roman is a wonderful speaker, and he knows a lot about Flutter and technology in general, the talk was just pure joy!
Netglade Team at F3 Fesrtival Prague 2023 (NetGlade)
Petr
Filip's Mad Science talk was an excellent example of how sometimes it is essential to do inconvenient, seemingly useless things, as they can lead to discoveries or unique products, like our beloved Flutter.
The talk was one of the shorter ones, but the message from it was is clear: "It is okay to do impractical things; you never know, maybe it will lead to something great". It was quite inspiring for me to be more creative and try to experiment more with Flutter.
The conference had many great talks, not just about Flutter/Dart but, of course, Firebase. I welcomed another talk called "Modelling your Flutter app in Firestore" from Jason Berryman. It was quite advanced, and discussed how to properly model your Firestore scheme to be able to scale up without paying millions.
I enjoyed our time at the conference and I'm looking forward to seeing what Flutter can offer in the future.
Jitka
I really liked the talk Building Scalable and Secure Apps with Flutter and Firebase: Best Practices and Pricing Strategies by Tomas Piaggio. Tomas showed how to cut down on Firebase read requests in our apps by using smart caching techniques. Specifically, he showed how to integrate a Firebase Bundles extension for data caching that seemed very easy to use and could save us both money and time on database queries. It was a really nice talk that left me excited to implement these newfound strategies in some of our projects.
Final thoughts
Overall, the Flutter Firebase Festival 2023 was a fantastic experience for our team. We gained valuable insights, made new friends, and left feeling inspired and motivated to continue our work in the Flutter community.
