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@zainab_builds
Zainab Nambi
Mobile developer · Flutter
0 followers 1 following Kampala, Uganda
Shipping offline-first apps. Looking for collaborators who care about reliability on low bandwidth.
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Offline sync is finally working without corrupting data
Third rewrite of the sync logic, and this time conflicting writes actually resolve sensibly instead of silently overwriting each other. Tested it by deliberately going offline, editing the same record on two devices, then reconnecting to see what happens. Still needs more edge case testing, but this was the part I was most afraid of shipping wrong.
Client wants me to start before signing anything, normal or a warning sign
Someone reached out about a Flutter app, sounded legitimate, but when I sent a short agreement to sign before starting they said we could 'sort the paperwork later' and asked me to begin this week. Maybe I'm being paranoid after hearing other people's stories, but this feels like the kind of thing that ends badly. Has anyone actually been burned by skipping this step?
Does keeping it free longer actually make the network more valuable later
The more people show up now while it costs nothing, the more useful the whole thing becomes for everyone already here, more feedback, more collaborators, more people to learn from. But that value has to be paid for somehow eventually, it doesn't run on goodwill forever. Genuinely curious how people think that gap gets bridged without charging the exact people you're trying to grow.
What actually keeps a professional community useful once the initial excitement wears off
The first few weeks of any new platform feel exciting just because everything is new. I'm more interested in what makes people still show up six months later once that novelty is completely gone. From what I've seen it's ongoing feedback on real work, actual collaborators found rather than just browsed, and being able to point to something concrete that happened because you were active here. Curious what's kept the longer-term members here actually engaged.
List rebuilds are killing performance on low-end phones
My list of items scrolls fine on my test device, but a friend tried it on an older budget Android phone and the scrolling stutters badly. I suspect the whole list is rebuilding on every state change instead of just the changed item. Any Flutter specific tips for this before I start ripping the widget tree apart blindly?
Trying to make maps usable with almost no data
Testing the app on a connection that drops to 2G on purpose, because that's genuinely what a lot of users will have. Full map tiles are unusable in that condition, so I'm experimenting with caching a simplified vector version of commonly viewed areas instead. Slower to build than just using a maps SDK out of the box, but the SDK assumes a kind of connection a lot of our users don't have.
Set up CI for the app so I stop breaking main
I pushed broken code to the main branch three times this month because I skipped running tests locally before pushing when I was in a hurry. Set up a basic GitHub Actions workflow this week that runs the test suite and blocks the merge if anything fails. Small setup cost, already saved me from a broken build once since then.
Our offline-first app is live on the Play Store
After months of the sync rewrites I've been posting about here, the app is finally public on the Play Store. It's a small team, just two of us, and the app itself is simple, but every offline edge case we tested for is finally in front of real users instead of just test devices. Genuinely nervous checking the crash reports this week.
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