# Getting started with Flutter | Yazin Alirhayim

It used to be that you needed to know Kotlin and Swift to develop apps for both Android and iOS, but those days are long gone.

Even the fundamental reasons for doing so have changed — some sort of compromise between performance and speed to deployment. React Native apps were kinda slower than native apps by a _smidge_, but with the introduction of Flutter — that difference was wiped out almost entirely. With Flutter, you get native app performance because you leave HTML and JS behind.

## [](https://yaz.in/p/starting-with-flutter#getting-the-basics)Getting the Basics

Flutter has an [excellent reference for web developers](https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flutter-for/web-devs) that I found more useful than alot of the intro guides out there. I don't need to know what a variable or for loop is — just tell me the concepts I need to hit the ground running. Coupled with this brief [high level overview](https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flutter-for/declarative) it's pretty much all you need to understand Flutter conceptually.

## [](https://yaz.in/p/starting-with-flutter#)Getting up and running with Flutter, _quickly_

A great place to start was to quickly paste snippets from the [web developer](https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flutter-for/web-devs) article I mentioned above into [DartPad](https://dartpad.dev/flutter) and see the results immediately. This gave me a feel for how things works in Flutter land, without fretting too much about setting everything up locally.

## [](https://yaz.in/p/starting-with-flutter#a-resources)A+ Resources

*   Build a [sick planet app from scratch](https://sergiandreplace.com/planets-flutter-from-design-to-app/). No fluff, all goodness. Loved recreating this myself.
*   Flutter Layout [cheat sheet](https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-layout-cheat-sheet-5363348d037e)
*   Build a functional [Startup Name Generator](https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/first-flutter-app-pt2/), start to finish, from scratch
*   [Comprehensive reference](https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter) for more great resources on Flutter

**👉 Stay tuned for my first app on Flutter, in a future post!**