devShakib

Blog — Flutter, Firebase, Cloud & AI · devShakib

Writing on Flutter, Firebase, cloud architecture and AI, from someone shipping production apps rather than summarising the docs.

A Free, Practical CI/CD Pipeline for Flutter Web on Firebase Hosting
A Testing Strategy That Survives a Real Codebase
Accessibility is not a lint rule you bolt on at the end
Agentic Coding Changed My Workflow: How I Actually Use AI Coding Agents Day to Day
AI Reviews My Pull Requests Now, but Not the Way You'd Think
APIs That Still Make Sense in Three Years
Async Communication Fails When You Write for Yourself Instead of the Reader
Async You Can Actually Reason About in Dart
Blameless Postmortems Die the Moment Someone Gets Punished
Bootstrapping vs. Raising, Read Off the Architecture Diagram
Bridging Swift and Kotlin With Pigeon: Type-Safe Flutter Plugins Done Right
Build Flavors Done Right, Before the Third Environment Bites You
Build, Buy, or Duct-Tape: How a Tiny Team Should Actually Decide
Building a Scalable Design System in Flutter That Survives Growth
By 2050 Nobody Writes Code, but Somebody Still Has to Be Right
Caching Is a Promise You Have to Keep
CanvasKit Layout Traps: The Unbounded Constraint Bug That Only Blanks Release Builds
Choosing a Stack You Won't Resent in Eighteen Months
Choosing State Management for a Large Flutter App in 2026: My Pragmatic Take
Core Web Vitals for CanvasKit Flutter Web: What You Can Actually Move
Dark mode is not an inverted stylesheet
Dart 3 in Practice: Records, Patterns and Sealed Classes That Actually Pay Off
Dart Extension Types: The Zero-Cost UserId You Should Be Using
Dart Records and Pattern Matching in Production: Where They Earn Their Keep
Deferred Imports in Dart: Code Splitting That Actually Splits
Dropping Below the Widget Layer: Writing a RenderObject From Scratch
Energy Is the Real Bottleneck, Not Intelligence
Estimates Are Bets, So Stop Pretending They're Promises
Event-Driven Architecture Without the Kafka Cargo Cult
Fast Is a Feeling, and I Optimized for the Feeling
Finding Product-Market Fit When You Think Like an Engineer
Firestore Data Modeling Patterns I Actually Use in Production
Firestore Data Modelling for Read-Heavy Sites: Denormalisation, Projections, and Indexes
Firestore Security Rules Deserve Unit Tests, Not Hope
Firestore Security Rules: Deny by Default, Then Open the Narrowest Hole
Flutter on the Web in 2026: WASM, CanvasKit, SEO, and When to Actually Ship It
Flutter Performance in Practice: Impeller, Jank Hunting, and Hitting 120fps
Flutter Web Code Splitting With Deferred Imports and Parametric Routes
Flutter Web Feels Laggy Even When the Metrics Look Fine: Five Fixes That Worked
Flutter Web SEO: Crawlable Content, JSON-LD, and Share Cards for a Canvas App
Forms at Scale in Flutter Without a Form Package
Free Tools as a Growth Engine: What 98 Browser Tools Taught Me About Distribution
Getting Work Off the Main Thread: Isolates Without the Hand-Waving
Google Renders Your SPA, and That's Exactly the Problem
Hiring Your First Three Engineers Is a Bet You Can't Diversify
How I Actually Choose a Model, and Why It Changes Every Quarter
How I close the gap between a Figma file and what actually ships
How I Do Authentication Without Rolling My Own Auth
How I Run 114 Posts, 98 Tools and 32 Games on Firebase Blaze for $0 a Month
I Stopped Building PWAs for Everyone and Started Building Them for Three Things
I stopped shipping hex codes and my design system finally scaled
I Test My Backups by Deleting Things on Purpose
I'm a CTO Who Still Opens the Editor Every Day
I've Been Coding for 12 Years; Here's What a 50-Year Career Actually Looks Like
Idempotency Keys: The Habit That Makes Payments, Webhooks and Retries Survivable
Infrastructure as Code When It's Just You and Two Other People
Internationalization That Doesn't Fall Apart at the First RTL Language
Keeping a Human in the Loop Without Making Them the Bottleneck
Least Privilege Is a Habit, Not a Config File
Making a Slow Model Feel Fast: The Interaction Details of Streaming LLM UX
Modern Flutter for Production: What I Actually Reach For (and What I Skip)
Motion is a language and most apps are mumbling
Multi-Agent AI Workflows in Practice: 32 Browser Games, One Kit Contract, Adversarial QA
My CI Pipeline Is a Product, Not a Chore
My First 90 Days as CTO Were Mostly Deleting Things
My Knowledge Diary Is a System, Not a Habit
Observability on a Budget That Rounds to Zero
Offline-First Without Corruption: Outboxes, Idempotency, and Conflict Resolution That Actually Holds
On-Call When the Team Is Three People and One of Them Is Asleep
On-Device and Edge AI Is Finally Practical: In-Browser and Mobile Inference in 2026
Per-PR Preview Deploys with Firebase Hosting Channels and GitHub Actions
Pragmatic GDPR for People Who Aren't Lawyers and Can't Afford One
Publishing a Flutter Package People Actually Depend On
RAG Over My Own Codebase Was Harder Than the Tutorials Promised
Registry-Driven Feature Modules in Flutter: 130 Features, One Parametric Route
Reviewing AI-Written Code: What a CTO Actually Checks in a Generated Diff
Robots Won't Arrive All at Once, They'll Leak In Through the Boring Jobs
Rotate Keys Without the 2 A.M. Outage
Rules Are Your Rate Limiter: Abuse-Proofing a Free Firebase Backend
Running a Remote Team Across Five Time Zones Without Losing the Thread
Saying No to Features Is the Whole Job
Scaling to 100k Users on Infrastructure You Can Still Reason About
Self-Hosting Fonts in Flutter Web: Dropping the google_fonts Package
Semantic Search Without a Vector Database: Cosine Similarity Over a Few Thousand Vectors
Serverless vs. Containers, With the Marketing Removed
Shipping a macOS App Outside the App Store: Code Signing, Notarization and Gatekeeper
Shipping AI Features in Flutter Without Setting Your API Bill (or Your Keys) on Fire
Shipping Fast Is an Engineering Problem, Not a Willpower One
Shipping My First Production LLM Agent, and Everything It Taught Me About Failure Modes
Shipping to Everyone at Once Is a Choice, and Usually the Wrong One
Slivers Demystified: Collapsing Headers, Parallax, and When to Write a RenderSliver
Structured Output From LLMs: A Retry-Repair Loop Your Parser Never Sees Through
Talking to Native: FFI, Pigeon, and Knowing Which One You Need
Technical Debt I Take On Purpose (and Log Like a Loan)
The 1:1 Is Not a Status Meeting, and Treating It Like One Wastes Both of You
The Animations Nobody Ships: Physics, Springs, and Interruptible Motion
The API Is the New UI, and Your Users Are Bots Now
The Best AI in My Stack Never Writes a Line of Code
The Cloud Bill Is a Design Review in Disguise
The Context Window Is a Budget, Not a Bucket
The Database Decision You Can't Undo, and the Ones You Can
The Encryption You Actually Need (and the Kind You're Wasting Time On)
The Engineering Strategy Doc That Ends in Decisions, Not a Wiki Graveyard
The Interaction to Next Paint Trap Nobody Warned Me About
The Monolith I'd Build Again, and the Seams I'd Cut First
The MVP That Wasn't Throwaway (and the Three That Were)
The N+1 You Can't See: Query-Shape Problems That Quietly Bleed Latency and Money
The Next Five Years of Software Development, Minus the Hype
The Screen Becomes a Fallback
The Security Work That Actually Matters When You're a Team of Three
The Tech Lead Is Not a Promotion
The Three Screens That Decide Trust: Empty, Loading, Error
The Tracer-Bullet Method for Reading a Codebase You Didn't Write
The Two-Person Engineering Playbook
The Unglamorous Details That Make an Interface Feel Expensive
The year I stopped being a frontend dev and became a design engineer
Threat Modeling on a Whiteboard in Forty-Five Minutes
Treating Prompt Injection Like the SQL Injection of This Decade
What 114 Blog Posts in Ten Months Actually Did for My Engineering Career
What a Two-Person Team Can Ship Now That Used to Take Ten
What Actually Shrinks a Flutter App: Split-Per-ABI, Deferred Components, and Reading the Size Report
What Leading Engineering Teams Taught Me About Senior Engineers
What Nobody Tells You About Being a CTO From Dubai
What Stays Irreducibly Human When the Machines Can Do Everything
Where I Put the Cache Decides Everything Else
Where My Secrets Live, and Why None of Them Are in the Repo
Why My Multi-Agent System Was a Distributed Systems Problem in Disguise
You Are the Architecture: System Design When the Team Is Just You
You Can't Ship What You Can't Measure, So I Built Evals Before Features
Your Code Review Culture Is Really About Who Feels Safe Pushing Back