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When sharing and accessing information can be achieved in just a few seconds from almost anywhere in the world, learning and collaboration are as easy as it’s ever been. Leaders talk about their work and ideas in podcasts, engineers tweet about best practices and programming languages, products and services are released, tools and frameworks created. It’s almost impossible not to get inspired by this non-stop stream of knowledge and ideas, but it can also be very difficult to keep up with it. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and imposter syndrome especially affect people working in technology. …

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I became an engineering manager at Koa Health 15 months ago after many years as an individual contributor and in technical lead roles. Stepping up into one of the top management positions in Engineering, it is normal to have some concerns and reservations. What am I supposed to do in this new role? Well, it took me over one year to start feeling comfortable in my new position. If you are new to the role or thinking about taking the step, I’m sure that what I’m about to share here will ease your way to become a successful manager.

Why do you want to change?


From individual contributor to management

I started my career as a software engineer

…more than 18 years ago. I spent most of that time as a developer, but I ultimately ended up covering a tech lead role in every company I worked for.

I joined Alpha more than 2 years ago as a software developer

Soon after, I became a tech lead. I saw the engineering team and the whole company grow, and I got really frustrated sometimes to see recurrent problems arise when technical and non-technical teams needed to work together. Nonetheless, when we opened an engineering manager position, I did not consider applying for this new role.

I really enjoy the challenges you get as a developer

Framing a problem, getting into this state of deep focus when you code and the immediate…

In this article, we will write our own ScrollPhysics to alter the behavior of the scroll in a ListView.

KISS (Keep It Simple… pleaSe)

Recurrent scenario, we have a set of pages or slides that we want to iterate over.

In this article, I’ll explain how to useRouteObserver and RouteAware in Flutter to automatically track screen transitions.

Why would I ever need to do that?

Best case scenario when you develop an app that gets released is that it’s an immediate success and users love it and use it exactly the way you anticipated. Reality is usually not like that, and you will need every piece of information available to understand how users use your product.

We have out of the box solutions like google analytics that gives us tons of metrics like sessions per user, screen navigations, notifications received and so on. …

In this article, I will explain what to do when you need to change completely the visuals for a Slider in Flutter and it is not enough with the options provided for customization by the theme.

One of the things I like the most about Flutter is the number of predefined widgets available to build really amazing UI and how easily you can customize them to your needs. But even when this customization is not enough, you can still dive a bit deeper and make it happen without things getting too messy.

I need a slider in my life

Easy one. Every single UI component library has…

In this article, I will explain how to download assets dynamically in a Flutter app so that they can be accessed later in offline mode.

Why would I ever need to do anything like that?

Let’s imagine I want to build an app about making cakes. I will include recipes, pictures, and videos, it will be super cool and full of amazing content, so I will upload all my those assets into S3 and get a nice and lean build.

Now, I decide I want my app to work offline. No biggie, I will include all my assets as part of my build. Suddenly my app goes from 5 or…

In this article I will present a use case where multiple GestureDetectors can interfere with each other and how by implementing our own GestureDetector we can modify the default precedences.

Da problem!

In one of my past articles I explained how I built a circular slider widget in Flutter, which is also published in Life was good and I was happy, until some unscrupulous user opened an issue claiming problems when the widget was used inside a scroll.

In this article, I will show how to use animations in Flutter by building a very simple yet powerful widget that can be used to create really fun interactions with the user.

Spin the wheel!

A few years ago I had to implement a spinning wheel for a web application and, well… I had a hard time with it, so I thought that I would try to do the same in Flutter. A couple of days later I was ready to publish it as a library You can see below an example of what you can do with it.

Have you ever wanted to spice up the usual boring sliders by providing a double handler or playing around with the layout?

In this article I’ll explain how to integrate the GestureDetector and the Canvas to build a circular slider in Flutter.

If you are not that interested in how to build it but just want to get the widget and use it, you can use the package I published in

Why do I need a circular slider?

In most cases you don’t, but imagine you want the user to select a time interval, or you just want a regular slider but want something a bit…

David Anaya

Engineer Manager at Koa Health

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