Coding

There’s a book I’ve wanted to share with the world for years. Sha’ar HaYichud (שַׁעַר הַיִּחוּד — “The Gate of Unity”), written by the Mitteler Rebbe, Rabbi DovBer Schneuri, is a foundational Chassidic text of remarkable depth. Years ago I went through the entire book and divided it into labeled sections and subsections — a structural layer I felt would make it significantly more accessible to readers. That work sat in my notes, half-forgotten, until a few weeks ago when something clicked and I decided to finally publish it. ...

Flutter web is coming. It promises excellent run time performance, smooth animations, elegant interface design -but at what cost? Flutter web is not production ready yet, so we have to cut it some slack, but looking at some basic demos show the main JS file weighing in at around 1MB, or 300KB gzipped. This isn’t totally unworkable, and we can expect some improvement by the time it hits production (for example, %40 of the JS file isn’t run and should be optimized out), but this still puts flutter at to upper end of web frameworks in terms of file size. And this is just a relatively small demo. ...

To my great consternation, route transition animations broke after upgrading the app – when going from one section to another, the old one was visible behind the new one until the transition was finished, and it looked terrible. I could not think what could be the problem. Then, out of the blue (well, after breaking my head on it for a while), it hit me – I didn’t have any material! (A bit of background – in the material design system, everything is based on material, which is inspired by how things work in the real world. ...

So – I finally finished rewriting all the low level code for my app, and I’m quite proud of it, actually. It was a big deal. And now it’s time for some UI stuff! I cranked up my trusty ol’ Visual Studio Code, opened up my flutter app code, some basic documentation, and started coding furiously. 💣 ⏳ 💥 After only a few minutes (really), I realized that I had no clue what I was doing. Which was a shocker – well, maybe not that much of a shocker, being that I had never learned what I was trying to do. But there was so much that I did know how to do! And I had just finished some Really Hard Stuff ™! Doesn’t that mean that everything I touch until the end of time will turn to gold? ...

Flutter Navigation Nested navigators, where there are tabs, and one or more tabs have their own navigation independent of the others, are a rite of passage which all flutter developers must go through. Navigation in flutter isn’t difficult per se, but it is something you have to wrap your head around. I found this article to be very helpful. I don’t know that I would recommend copy-pasta ing his precise methodology, but he brings a lot of the critical concepts out in stark relief in a small app.

On z-index Z-index seems simple. But as you have multiple values set at different stacking contexts… I have met the enemy, and he is z-index. z-index is more sinister than !imporant propagation. Beware of z-index.

Ever since css flex became a thing, I don’t really do web development anymore. Whenever a problem comes up, I throw flex at it until it goes away. And am I the only one who can never remember what all those properties do? I kind of bounce between align-items and align-contents until something works. If I had a nickle for each time I checked out css tricks…