DEV Community: SoulNinja-dev

Hackathons oh Hackathons

SoulNinja-dev — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 13:50:38 +0000

Background Story

In the start of 2021, I found out about MLHacks, who organised a lot of hackathons for students above and below 18.
So that got me interested, and I registered for their hackathons.
The first one which I attended was New Year Hacks in which we were supposed to make a hack related to new year.

New Year Hacks

So i teamed up with a couple of people and built this site: https://nynm.co which is basically a tasks app which uses the google authetication to save your tasks.
We used basic html, css, js and firebase to do this project.

While this hackathon was going on, I heard about a huge 1 week hackathon which MLH was organising the next week.
So I obviously very interested, applied to it.
This hackathon is Local Hack Day: Build which you can find more info on: https://lhd.mlh.io/build

My Experience

Hackathons were very new to me, in fact the new year hack was my first ever hackathon.
I didnt know how to choose teammates, I didnt know how to collab faster, I didnt know how to take the project to production level in 2 days.
This was what I learned from it:

New Year Hacks

Always find teammates from your Time-Zone. I found this out the hardest way possible. Even though we did finish our project, it was very hard for us to work together and make updates. There were 5 of us, and all of us were from completely different time zones. so take that in mind which choosing teammembers in virtual hackathons.
Keep the project idea simple In the starting we planned a lot, thinking of using the sponsored API's but we werent able to do that. so keep the project idea simple.
Have a particular theme in mind
Split work properly
Split it out between the teammates so that everyone gets a fair share of work.

Local Hack Day

LHD is a week long hackathon, and you and your guilds are very closely connected, all points which you achieve goes to your guild, so keep that in mind.

In these one week builds, you will learn a lot and build a lot. My github activity blew up this week, it was full green the whole 7 days.
Take rest, during long hackathons, its very easy to lose track and not get any sleep, but make sure your sleeping well and working.

Do not waste time.
I wasted a lot of time researching on the best possible way to do it. Instead of doing it like that, just start out and make it better on the way.

What I learned and built this hackathon:

https://nynm.co
TicTacToe game (java)
Web Scraper (selenium)
Zoom bot (Automation)
Password Manager (python, mysql)
Encryption techniques (cryptography)
Morse Code Translator app (python, Tkinter)
Sorting Algorithms (bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion sort)
Discord Bot (discord.js)
JavaScript Basics (New Language)
Quadruped Bot (Hardware Hack | Arduino)

Thank you

Thanks for reading all along!
If you wanna contact me, here's my discord: SoulNinja#7777
And I'll catch you in the next one 👋

Why Flutter??

SoulNinja-dev — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 10:45:17 +0000

So you are curious why you should use flutter instead of other languages out there.
Here are 5 reasons why you should learn and use flutter for your app development dreams.

The same rant. ONE CODEBASE
With Flutter
you just need to MAINTAIN one codebase.
You just need to DEBUG one codebase.
you just need to UPDATE one codebase.
You just need to learn ONE LANGUAGE - Dart.
If you have any background with programming you can pick up dart like a magnet picking up iron shreds.
We can build ios web desktop android.
Mobile, Web, Desktop.
But you are a programmer who doesn't only want to focus on app development but also web, desktop, and also obviously app development.
Well then, Flutter is that go to language for you.
In addition to mobile apps, Flutter supports Web development AND you can compile Flutter code to native Windows, macOS, and Linux desktop app.s.

If this already hasn't hooked you yet, here are more reasons.
Beautiful Layout widgets.
With so many screen sizes in the world right now, you might think that making an app for each of them is impossible and you want to stick with web development.

BUT,
Until flutter, app developers were using constraints that were only for small-scale applications and non-complex apps.
so it becomes harder to make good UIs for larger projects.
so
Flutter takes inspiration from the web which is responsive design and implements it within its widgets and layouts.

So flutter has widgets like Row, Columns, Stacks, Paddings, Center to keep the layout building really easy and well structured.

If even that wasn't enough.

HOT RELOAD!
Flutter has hot reload!
normally in java and swift, it takes around 20 to 30 seconds on a fast computer to compile and download the apk on the emulator or mobile.
For that flutter has Hot reload and hot restart which takes less than a second to show the differences. It becomes amazing to develop UI's with that feature, the second you wanna make a change you just press ctrl s, and it hot reloads it on the app, and you can see the changes real-time.
So, therefore it becomes even easier to change and build your app the way you want it to look.
ITS OPEN SOURCE!
U can see the backend code for every single line of code that you writing for every widget, every button every single thing in your dart file.
and it just takes a click or a shortcut according to ur editor to access that.
and If you want to customize it you can do it according to the way you want it to function.
It's that simple.
Unlike other languages cough apple

So that's it for this one! Hope you got more clarity on why flutter is really a good framework to learn and build with!
And also Thanks for reading!

What is Flutter?

SoulNinja-dev — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 06:39:02 +0000

Flutter is a UI-ToolKit developed by a team @Google with one thing in mind.

Making it easy for App Developers to make apps natively for both Android and iOS.

Before Flutter, this is how App developers used to make apps for both Android and iOS.

First, they would learn java, kotlin, and android app development, make their app ready on one platform,
and then they would switch to swift and iOS development and repeat the long process again for iOS to get their app on both google play store and app store. Seems tedious eh?

Not only that.
When you are making an app. It isn't a one-time thing. You have to push updates, bug fixes all the time, and for each update and bug fix, you would have to update that on both android and iOS.

and also nowadays,
almost everything in the world has a screen and it's running on some OS.
If you need your app to run on that screen size and aspect ratio to fit that particular screen,

Imagine the number of codebases you have to keep up-to-date. It is just impossible to do that on a long term basis.

And that is where Flutter comes in, with that one thing in mind:
Making it easy for the developer and having only one code base for all the different screen sizes and OS.
Let it be Web, Android, iOS, Desktop. It will support them all.
and your app won't look the same in all of those.

With the layout widgets, we can make the apps look native to the user.
With the MaterialApp widget, we get access to all the widgets and UI tools present in Material Design. which includes tons of cool icons, colors, fonts, sound, shapes, animations and so much more...

Even with all of this combined, You as a developer handle only ONE codebase.

And that is Flutter.

//pictures were taken from google and app brewery 💥