FlutterCon NYC 2024
I went to FlutterCon NYC last year to see what the broader Flutter community was working on. Our team at Genetec in Montreal uses Flutter for in-vehicle law enforcement software—software police officers depend on in the field, where uptime isn't negotiable. I came back with a few things worth sharing.
Why Flutter for this kind of work
I led the UI/UX and full-stack Flutter development for a cross-platform replacement of legacy police software. Flutter let us ship to multiple platforms from one codebase with native performance. Fine in theory. In practice, keeping a dozen engineers aligned on a mission-critical app takes deliberate process.
What stood out at the conference
The talks I found most useful were the ones about state management that doesn't fall apart as teams grow, CI/CD tweaks that actually reduce build times, testing under conditions where a bug means a cop can't do their job, and code review norms that keep quality up without creating bottlenecks.
A lot of it confirmed things we were already thinking about. Some of it gave us better vocabulary for problems we'd been solving in different ways.
What we adopted
I walked the team through the key talks when I got back. We ended up taking on a few of the CI/CD changes and one of the state management approaches. The field issue rate dropped noticeably after that release—85% below what the legacy system was hitting.
The more interesting part was talking through testing philosophy. When failure is expensive, you have to be intentional about what you actually test versus what just makes the metrics look good.
On the ground
Some of my favorite work has been sitting with customers in the field, reproducing issues in real time with QA and product beside me. There's no substitute for watching someone use your software in the environment it was built for.
Growing the team
Outside the code, I've been involved in mentoring newer engineers and running technical onboarding. It's satisfying to see people start to think in systems rather than screens.