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ANDREW BROGDON: Hey, everybody, and welcome to the #AskFlutter
Q&A here at Flutter Interact.
As you just saw, Google's been putting a ton of effort
into making Flutter a great way to build beautiful apps,
but Flutter's an open source project.
It's supported by a whole community of coders
and designers and YouTube creators and sample
authors and everything else.
And if you're watching this live stream with us right now,
you're part of that community, and we want to hear from you.
I'm Andrew Brogdon from the Flutter developer relations
team, and I've got a few friends up here with me.
KATE LOVETT: My name is Kate Lovett,
and I'm with the Flutter engineering team.
Andrew and I will be your co-hosts for this session,
and we also have a moderator who is collecting
your questions for us.
JOHN RYAN: I'm John.
I'm from the DART developer relations team,
and I'll be answering your tweets and questions
in the live chat.
KATE LOVETT: We'll also be having
a number of special guests that we'll be interviewing
during these sessions, and we are joined now
by our first guest, Matias Duarte.
Welcome.
Thank you for joining us.
MATIAS DUARTE: Hi.
Thanks for having me.
ANDREW BROGDON: Yeah, so most of you
just saw Matias in the keynote a few minutes ago,
and we have some viewer questions that we have sourced.
And we're going to start asking them.
So, Kate, I think you--
KATE LOVETT: Yes!
MATIAS DUARTE: All right.
I'm excited.
KATE LOVETT: I do I do.
I actually pulled this one off of Twitter just a little bit
ago from Sunil.
They would like to know, what is the future of Flutter,
which, of course, we've heard a little bit about today
in the keynote, but, in particular,
what are some of the challenges that you
think we're going to be facing as we get there.
MATIAS DUARTE: Oh, for sure.
Thanks for the question.
I really do think the future of Flutter is creating a--
just a tool that can help everybody
reach a consistent experience wherever they are,
really trying to move away from being burdened
by the technology, thinking about the technology
first, thinking about your constraints
first, and really focusing on what is it that you're
imagining in terms of an experience,
and just focusing on those parts of the problems.
It's that, like, ultimate creative potential
that I find really inspiring about Flutter
and what I want to help in any way that I can.
What was the second part of the question?
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KATE LOVETT: Well, I guess the second part
of the question involved what kind of challenges
do you think that we'll be facing,
but I think you've been answering to that quite a bit.
MATIAS DUARTE: Oh, sure.
I mean, I feel always one of the great things about working
at Google, in general, and working
with all the talented people on all these teams
is they're really focused on what the users or the customers
really need, what they really want.
So our challenges are really all your challenges,
all the developers' challenges.
You tell us where your pain points are,
where your headaches are where, where you find things that
are not fun that you wish the drudgery was taken out of,
and those are the problems that we want to solve.
ANDREW BROGDON: So I actually have
a question that sort of builds on something you just said
and something that we heard in the keynote, which
was, you were talking about Flutter
seems to be targeted at removing pain points
and removing sort of drudgery from application development
and allowing people to spend more time on other things.
I'm curious, what specifically is the work
that you imagine Flutter being able to take off
of a developer's plate, and then what
do you imagine them doing with the time
that they save that way?
You know, what are you looking forward to seeing people build?
MATIAS DUARTE: That's a great question.
I was just talking about this, actually, earlier with Grant,
where we were both talking about how the kind of--
not just the speed of development
and the speed of feedback in Flutter,
but, in general, like having access
to the right abstractions and to be
able to add whatever extra nuance or little detail
you want really easily.
What that creates is a space for exploration and creativity,
because normally, you know, you're working under deadlines.
You're working under constraints, right?
Nobody has an infinite amount of time
to just do whatever they want, right?
You're trying to solve a problem,
and the faster you can try things,
the quicker you can get to that point of realizing, hey,
this is pretty good.
I like this, but what happens if I turn this just a little
further?
Let me see what that looks like.
Or whoa, what happens if I invert this now?
And like, wow, that's really unexpected.
That's really delightful.
Or I thought this approach was going to work.
We assemble it quickly, and then you're
like, oh no, that's really missing something
that the users need.
We need to find a way to, again, kind of push the boundaries
and find a new solution, right?
So, for me, the speed and the ease
and the kind of like mental model affinity of how you're
thinking about a design problem, all of these things
directly contribute to creativity.
That's what they unlock.
So it's basically removing blockers to creativity.
ANDREW BROGDON: Interesting.
KATE LOVETT: That's fantastic.
ANDREW BROGDON: Thank you.
KATE LOVETT: And, you know, in answering that, you mentioned
something about delightful experiences,
and I actually saw earlier another question asking,
how would you define a delightful experience?
MATIAS DUARTE: That's a good question.
I'm not sure that there is one right answer,
but I always find that the--
it sits at this intersection that we're always
looking for between the form and the function,
between satisfying the user's practical needs,
but also satisfying their emotional needs.
How can something surprise you, delight you,
and make you feel good, feel natural, feel easy.
We really are spending so much time
in these digital experiences that they are digital worlds.
They're an expansion of our world.
We're living in kinds of virtual realities,
and we should make those worlds wonderful.
KATE LOVETT: That's fantastic.
Very well said.
ANDREW BROGDON: Well, thank you so much.
That's all the time we have for right now
with you, so if you could just leave your microphone right
there, thank you so much for joining us.
KATE LOVETT: Have a good time as well.
ANDREW BROGDON; Yeah, Thank you, Matias.
KATE LOVETT: Thank you so much.
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