Originally published on bendyworks.com.

Recently Uri Shaked wrote an inspiring article about his experience publishing a blog post each day for a month. I've decided to combine his great idea with my goal of becoming a better Flutter developer. For the month of December, I will be building a Flutter app and writing a daily blog post about the process.

My goals

• Become a better Flutter developer
• Practice writing concise blog posts
• Practice writing project requirements

What I am building

For this challenge I will be building Birb, an image sharing social network dedicated to birds. An Instagram for birds, if you will.

Since I have not built the app yet, I don't actually know how much will get accomplished in December. Here are my planned MVP features:

• Global stream page of all posted images
• User authentication
• Image posting
• User profile page
• Individual image page
• Comments on image page

If I finish the MVP, I'll add more features. Some potential features, in no particular order:

• Push notifications
• #hashtags on images
• A/B Testing
• Themes
• Friendship graph/following
• Friends stream of images
• Liking images

What to expect

Every day* I will create a new blog post describing my most recent progress. Over the month these small steps will hopefully add up to a nice app. The blog posts will mostly be short and to the point, covering a small widget or feature.

As this will be an ongoing development project where I will be experimenting with different patterns, don't expect everything to be implemented perfectly the first time. There will be refactors and bad choices along the way. I will, however, be following best practices like writing tests, running CI, linting, etc.

If you are new to professional development worfklows, you can follow the process and get a peak into how projects can be run. I will be writing the stories and implementing the features and my colleague Pearl will be reviewing progress and code.

Technologies

Some of the technologies I plan to use in Birb:

• Flutter (duh)
• Firebase Firestore for a database
• Firebase Auth for user authentication
• Firebase Cloud Storage for hosting images
• Firebase Cloud Functions for serverless computing
• Material Design for aesthetics
• Device media APIs

How can I be a part of it?

What to be more involved? Here are some areas to start:

• Open issues with suggestion of better approaches or ideas for the app
• Follow along with the series and build your own app
• Follow @abraham and @pblatteier notifications of new posts
• Share this on Twitter
• Star the GitHub repository

See you tomorrow when I create the initial Flutter app.

P.S., if you are in the Madison area, come to GDG Madison's Flutter Live Viewing Party on December 4th.

*Posting every day is my intention but I may take some days off.