What’s next?

Why did I leave my job, what am I doing next and insights from the Flutter Firebase Festival 🚀

Almost a month has passed already since I became free. Or, as some people call it, unemployed 😁 Since I’ve left my previous job, I can say that I’m enjoying every moment of this period of my life. Today I will share the reasons behind my decisions, as well as what’s next for me in my professional journey. You know that I like to talk (or rather write), and this newsletter won’t be highly technical, so grab a cozy drink (at least if you’re in Latvia, with October being in full swing with rain and wind), and let’s dive in 😛

For the past 6 years, I’ve been working in a mobile studio called Chili in Riga, Latvia. I joined the company when it had around 10 employees as a junior Android developer. It was an amazing journey, during which I transitioned to be a Flutter developer, and eventually became the mobile tech lead. The professional experience I acquired during that time is invaluable and I will be forever grateful for all of the opportunities that Chili facilitated in my career. So of course, making a decision to leave wasn’t a hasty one, as well as it wasn’t easy.

For a junior developer, working in an outsourcing company gives a lot of growth opportunities because you get to participate in different projects, aren’t stuck with a legacy tech stack, and tap into various business domains. This part was exciting and one of my favorites for a long time. After X projects they all become the same, but what bugged me the most is that projects come and go. You work for 3-6-12 months on a project, and then you don’t. You don’t feel like you’re actually making an impact, you don’t see how your technical solutions influence the product growth, you don’t constantly work with user feedback, so at some point, it starts feeling like you’re just a machine in a factory. That’s how I’ve transitioned into a tech lead position.

Which was a lot of fun while it lasted. With the team, we did a lot of important enhancements related to team & company work, public image, and technical processes. I’m not even sure that “tech lead” is an appropriate title because I did a lot of different things, but in smaller companies, those title lines get blurred, and in the end, it really doesn’t even matter. But this enjoyment also had a lifetime, and at some point, it started to feel even more meta-level work than client projects. I just stopped feeling like my personal work had any meaning. Which, of course, impacted my motivation and made me question my life choices. And now we’re here 😅

By now you should’ve guessed that I want to work in a product-based company. The domains that I’m interested in are medicine, science, ecology, animals, education, traveling, and healthy lifestyle. Also, I hope I will never get to touch fintech again 😂 I’ve worked on so many different fintech applications, that I’m sure I had enough for life. I might be looking for a product-based company in those domains, but first I will try something else and hope that it will work out. And that is to launch my own product! I have a backlog of ideas for all kinds of applications, each solving my personal problem (although maybe if I have so many problems, I should see a specialist 😂). Now that I’m actually writing this for an audience, it feels kinda scary, because honestly, I have no idea whether any of them will work out, so failure potential is real. But then again, I’m at this point in my life where I have this opportunity, skills, vision, and the best business partner I could ever wish for — my husband 😁 You can be sure that I will be sharing our journey in this newsletter 🙂

I have this dream of speaking at least 5 languages by the time I’m 30. I’m currently learning my language #4, which is Spanish. While doing so, I’ve tried a lot of things - all kinds of applications (some of which I closed and never opened again after losing my 200+ days streak 🙈), web services, and online lessons. One of the problems that I have though, is I don’t (yet) live in a Spanish-speaking country, so I really don’t have enough real-life practice. And I don’t want to bother my Spanish-speaking friends with my cringy attempts at their language 😁 That’s how I’ve arrived at one of my ideas - to create (yet) another language-learning application. My problem with most of them is that they’re not personalized enough and often offer artificial learning experiences, not applicable in real life. I will share more details on the specific concepts in the future, but right now I would also be very grateful for your help, as you can impact the functionality and priorities of this application. If you’re learning a language and want to help out, you can fill in this survey about your experience, it will take 5-10 minutes of your time. Muchas gracias 😅

Speaking about the technical side of things, it isn’t hard to guess that I’m using Flutter. And Firebase 😁 So going to the Flutter Firebase Festival for me wasn’t only about enjoying the event and giving a talk, but also for learning a couple of things that will be useful for my startup 😛

Flutter Firebase Festival (F3) was an amazing event organized by the Invertase team on 26-27th of September in Prague. Two days full of talks about, well, Flutter and Firebase 😁 Fun times with the community and top-notch organization! I really enjoyed the scavenger hunt, where we had to scan QR codes all over the venue in order to find swag (sometimes that even included Puf’s forehead 😂), and thankful for the opportunity to give a talk!

It was my first joint talk and I was lucky to partner with Mangirdas Kazlauskas, who I’m sure you all already know. We shared the tips & tricks of working with Firebase Remote Config and how it can enhance your product. You can be sure I’ll be using all of them in my own one 😁 While the talk recordings are not yet available, you can already check out the slides we made. By the way, we made them with Flutter, with the help of an amazing package made by Mangirdas - the flutter_deck. Since you can run the Flutter code right from your slides, you can make very cool demos during your presentation. Check it out if public speaking is something that you do.

Even though I worked a lot in my previous job with Firebase, there are still many things I haven’t used yet. One of them is Firebase Extensions, so I was eager to see some demos of how that works and what problems they can solve. And they can solve a lot! I’ve got to try one out just recently, and while the specific extension wasn’t enough for my use case, it did lead me on the path of using Cloud Functions (also something I haven’t personally used before). Expect me to join the “When will Cloud Functions be available on Dart?” team very soon 😂 One extension that I have my eye on and which I will be checking out pretty soon is the RevenueCat Firebase Extension. At some point, RevenueCat has already saved me some time and pain while implementing subscriptions, and I’m sure that with the extension I will save even more.

Speaking of Firebase, another widely used service is the Cloud Firestore - a NoSQL remote database. From Remi’s talk, I’ve learned about a new package cloud_firestore_odm that makes working with Firestore within Flutter type safe by making use of code generation. If you’ve watched my talk about pigeon, you know that I swear by type safety, and even though the package is still in alpha, I will be checking it out.

Some talks that I’ve missed, but definitely will be watching as soon as the recordings are available because I’m sure they can be useful for my app:

1. Front-end and backend with Flutter and Firebase by Kevin Moore

2. Building Scalable and Secure Apps with Flutter and Firebase: Best Practices and Pricing Strategies by Tomas Piaggio

3. Improving Firebase Backend for Flutter App through Cloud Functions by Sasha Denisov

4. Modelling your Flutter app in Firestore by Jason Berryman

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And that’s it for today! Once again, I would be very grateful if you fill in this survey if you’re learning a language, and hopefully next time we will be talking about some technical challenges or successes. Or maybe something else that I will find fascinating 😁 Meanwhile, we can connect on X (aka Twitter). Hasta pronto!

-Daria 💙