Chris Sells is a Senior Product Manager at Google, responsible for many aspects of Flutter, including the end-to-end developer experience, the ecosystem, Flutter desktop, as well as working with top customers and clients.
Chris has many years of experience contributing to the evolution of UI toolkits including over 9 years as a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and 2 years as a Vice President at Telerik, the makers of popular UI toolkits for the Microsoft ecosystem. Chris has published 12 books over the years on software development using Microsoft component libraries.
In my chat with Chris, we cover many topics including lessons learned from building UI technologies, the evolution of software engineering, new features in Flutter, Flutter Desktop, Flutter Web and working on open source projects.
01:25 -- Chris’ background and work at Google
05:41 -- Challenges and trade-offs in building a UI toolkit
13:29 -- Flutter’s approach to multi-platform support - how it avoids common pitfalls
19:20 -- Navigator 1.0 vs Navigator 2.0
28:15 -- Flutter Desktop for Windows - getting to alpha and what’s left to do for a full 1.0 release
41:15 -- Flutter Web - unique challenges of targeting the web and how the team is approaching this.
47:10 -- Building Flutter as an open source project
51:25 -- Chris’ publications and approach to writing
56:11 -- Final thoughts and advice
Publications By Chris:
Books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Sells/e/B001H6OL1K
Medium Blog Posts: https://medium.com/@csells
Twitter: @csells