Justin Goldstein

@StartupSlack I was hoping to join your Slack group, and found the typeform on your landing page currently is not working! Let me know if there is any other way for me to request. Seems like an awesome network.

Excited to be finding my first users for Grading Helper, a web app that instantly grades handwritten student work and generates detailed, rubric-aligned feedback. Our early users say it has the potential to cut grading time in half! #EdTech #teacher #teacherlife

Flutter learning today: A metaphor for the rendering pipeline. The widget tree layer is a blueprint for the UI, the element tree is a builder, who decides which updates to the blueprint should be sent to the construction team, the render tree, which handles layout and painting.

The Flutter Embedder is like the theatre building and production crew, it ensures the stage is set for the production to take place in different venues (Operating Systems).

An apt metaphor for Flutter (courtesy of ChatGPT): Think of Flutter like a theatrical production: The widgets are like actors and the script: They decide what needs to be displayed. The Flutter Engine is like a director, coordinating rendering and layout, interpreting the script

Flutter learning today: State objects are maintained separately from widgets in the widget tree because this allows each widget to rebuild their children without worrying about destroying their persistent states, simplifying the Stateful vs Stateless widget API.

Flutter metaphor for understanding architecture: Can think of Flutter like a company, where the company is a hierarchy (tree) of independent orgs (widgets). The orgs can pass down info (context) to sub-orgs, and orgs notify their parent orgs of changes in personnel (state).

Addition: in order to get rid of jank, you need to offload expensive tasks to their own isolate so they do not block the main queue.

Flutter learning today: All dart code runs in isolates (like threads w/out shared mem). Isolates execute events, e.g. painting screens or handling user actions on one main queue. If an event on the queue takes longer than expected, painting events are delayed, creating UI jank.

Found out about 2 layers of flutter today: Rendering layer builds a flexible tree of objects that determines UI layout. Widget layer is an abstraction on top that is easier to work with, since it uses composition. Each widget is linked to a corresponding object in the render tree

From my flutter learning today (another day of not a ton of learning): Learned about SafeArea -- particularly neat that you can nest multiple SafeAreas within each other and they will perfectly make it so that your app's content does not overflow a screen's visible area.

Day 3 of Flutter learning-- not as much progress. Biggest win today was realizing that I could lower certain statefull variables in the widget tree. So when setState is called to expose the changed state in the child, the parent no longer refreshes. Makes for a smoother app :)

day 2 of what I learned in flutter... how layout info is passed: A parent widget tells its children how big they can be and asks how much space they'll take. The child informs the parent based on answers from its children -- Therefore, the child cannot know its parent's size

Today is my first post about my frontend-dev learning journey! Something I learned today in Flutter: Dialogs need to be shown after an initState call, otherwise changes in the InheritedWidget will not be reflected in the dialog-showing widget.