Dart Frog 1.0 – Jorge Coca, Very Good Ventures

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv. Happy to introduce our next guest to you.

His name is Jorge Coka. And, and Jorge is the head of engineering at Very Good Ventures, maybe a company you're familiar with. I know a lot of you out there probably aren't, but you're gonna learn about him today.

Let's welcome Jorge to the show. Jorge, welcome to Text, uh, text Drug tv. How are you?

Very good, very good. Very excited to have it to be here. We're very happy to have you on, Jorge.

We're going to get in a very good ventures and, and stuff like Flood or Dart. But before we do, let's talk a little bit about you. You're head of engineering over at Very Good Ventures.

What did what? Give us your background. Yeah, absolutely.

Um, so I joined Very Good Ventures in 2020, uh, um, in January as a senior engineer. It was a very small company at that moment. Uh, I think I joined as the sixth employee.

Uh, and like the major project that they were known for was for Hamilton the Musical. Uh, like they built a mobile app for Hamilton. If you haven't seen the musical, it's amazing by the way.

But there was this one feature, like the lottery that actually explored in popularity. Like everyone wanted to get free tickets to see the show, whether it was in Broadway, New York, in Chicago. Then it ended up going to LA and all those things.

And I was very excited to join a company that was working in Hamilton because I'm a big fan. But prior to that I was working at B M W, the car manufacturer. And one of the challenges that we had at B M W was that, um, our digital offering was moving slower than the way we wanted it, right?

So I had the privilege to get B n w be part of the team that was kind of like leading the transition from like native mobile technologies to, uh, to flatter, which I know that that is something that we're gonna be covering a little bit later. And that's what got me to very good ventures, because very Good Ventures was an agency just focused slightly on, uh, flatter development. They proved the success of Flatter with Hamilton, uh, myself, I proved the success of Flatter within B M W.

So it was like a perfect combination of the two. Like, it's like, hey, I can share my flatter expertise with more companies. I started with Hamilton, but then we started partnering with Google, with Betterment, with Toyota, with American Airlines, right?

So that kind of like, uh, was like the perfect mix to, for an agency to be consider like a third leadership, uh, agency in the flatter world to start building, uh, more impactful products with like a very, um, I would say rich portfolio of, of customers. Right? And since then, like it's been, I don't know, it's been a super fund ride.

Uh, we very recently announced the acquisition of a company year y called Create Thrive. So 2020, I was the sixth employee. Now I have a team of like about 100 engineers, right?

So it's been a very exciting journey up until up until now. Absolutely. It sounds exciting.

And so I I I wanna jump into Fluter, but before we do, so very good venture. Sounds like it's a company that creates mobile applications for people. Yeah, we specialize on helping companies to build their products.

And in the technology side, we specialize in this technology called Flatter, right? Uh, we've observed that we can add way more value faster without like losing like performance or like safeness in the, in the kind of like when we get to, to the market, right? Uh, so we've been taking, uh, we've been partnering with, again, like companies like Toyota, Google, American Airlines, to develop like many of the product needs that they need from design to strategy, all the way to the technology execution.

Uh, that means that we've done a lot of like mobile apps, but thanks to the power of Flatter, we've been gotten into like the vehicle infotainment, right? Like for, for Toyota, we've gotten into like developing websites. Like many of the projects that we've done with Google, they were to push the boundaries of like web development with flatter artificial intelligence and all those things, right?

So it's a very versatile tool that allows us to pretty much anywhere where there's a screen be able to run your product effectively. Excellent, excellent, excellent. And you know, we should mention Flutter is is a open source project, correct.

And, uh, do, do you give us, can you give an idea of the scale of the amount, like users or apps that use Flutter in general? Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, just to better understand what Flutter is, uh, pretty much like everyone in the world, they're already using a very small but important part of Flutter.

Uh, flutter is a very clever idea. Um, a group of engineers at Google, they were like, the way we develop apps is broken. You still have to do Android, you still have to do iOS.

There's been many efforts to go multi-platform. We see React native Shama in different ML five frameworks, but someone in the development lifecycle, whether it was the company, the development team or the business, they have to pay a penalty performance developer experience, just robustness of, or like happiness of developers, right? So no one was really happy with those, but still we were like, Hey, when we build a an app, what matters is the brand that we put out there.

Not that it's Android and io it's like my, my parents, my sister, they don't care about that. They just wanna use the app. So this clever group of engineers at Google, they were like, Hey, we already have an amazing application that is perfect at painting pixel cells on the screen that it's Google Chrome.

So what they did was to get Google Chrome, just remove everything that is not necessary. So just get it to the rendering framework and use that to build a new system called Flatter that would allow you to build beautiful experiences to paint every single pixel that you want on the screen based on the rendering engine of, of Google Chrome. And then what they realized is like, how can we improve the developer experience?

And they started building with Dart that it was like an attempt to like replace JavaScript in, in the browser back in 2011. That that didn't materialize, but prove to be a very effective language when it comes to building user interfaces. It allows you to have just in time compilation or ahead of time compilation, right?

So whether you're developing and your savior changes, you see the code reacting immediately. But if you want to compile to Native code and go to the low level, you have the same possibilities as well. That guarantees 60 frame per second, right?

All the things that like, uh, good development team needs are provided by flatter and dark, all the good things that the customer needs are provided as well, like beautiful experiences, animations, performance packages, accessing to the operating system, all that is provided. So to me, flatter proof that is the ultimate like product development framework as opposed to like having that identity of I'm an iOS developer and I'm I'm Android developer, it creates kind of like these silos within an organization. So since then, um, as I said, like Hamilton for example, which serves like a million customers, uh, is built with Flatter B M W and mini, uh, all their like mobile applications that like, they, they're like worldwide available and they're built on top of flatter.

But like we see companies like Toyota that they're going beyond mobile apps, and they have decided that what you see in the navigation system, what you see in the like behind the steering wheel, right? Those screens, they're gonna be built, be built on top of flatter because it's open source, right? So that also like brings down the cost of development, especially for those embedded systems.

It's well, uh, understood by the community. There's like a very big community like all around the world. Like we see like the supporting GitHub, like that it's higher now that React native and things like that, right?

And it's pretty easy to do a lot of things with very little effort because what I was saying, like that compilation kind of like time has disappeared. So you're coding, you're sitting with a designer, you can validate on real time, whether you're like, pixels are what you wanted to see, that means that you can, uh, close the gap to go to market, right? And test your product, um, sooner rather than, rather than later.

And that helps organizations to kind of like also like, um, organize around the technology. So it seems it serves also like a cultural pivot for it, where it's like all of a sudden you break the silos, you think about your product and not just iOS or Android or whatever platform you're going to, you can be platform agnostic and just focus on your product, your brand. Uh, since then, like of course it's used like inside Google by a lot of like different teams.

Uh, the Stadia team, um, like was using Flatter. We see like AdWords, uh, Google Pay, Google for Education, they rely a lot on, on Flatter as well. But other companies like American Airlines, betterment, uh, new Bank in Latin, like, uh, they're all relying on Flatter as well.

Got it. Let's quickly talk about dart. Absolutely.

DART is a lovely language. Um, I always say that if you know Java, if you know JavaScript, if you know TypeScript, if you know csharp, congratulations, you can call yourself a Dart developer because they, the, there's a lot of effort being put into the developer experience to make sure that that is a language that feels familiar for everyone. It's a language that it doesn't come with surprises.

It is true. That might be a little bit behind some of the trends that you see in other languages that are like, I cannot pushing the limits, for example, like Lin or Swift, right? But that means that they're trying to observe the ecosystem and once they see how like the community is adapting some of those changes, they try to introduce it in a way that feels familiar and almost like reduce the learning curve to to zero.

So that is a language that, like I've done a lot of trainings for companies, uh, and I never teach that. And that's a privilege that you don't get to see many other places, right? Because I'm saying like, if you already know the basics of coding, if you know what's an object, what's a class, what's an interface and all those things, dark is not gonna introduce any elements of surprise.

And that is a super powerful feature because it allows you then to focus on how to add business value to the code that you're writing as opposed to having to learn the language, then learn a framework and then you can start being productive. Got it. All right.

We set a lot of tables here, a lot of plates. Now let's turn our attention to Dark Frog, which is something that very Good Ventures has developed and released. I think it's version one.

Oh, you know, first official version out here. Talk to us about it. Absolutely.

So given the nature of our business being an agency, we maintain in our portfolio just in parallel. Like if you look at our portfolio today, we might have 20, 25 projects happening in parallel. That means that when we make a mistake, we make it in 25 different places, but we can learn from 25 different places on how to avoid making those mistakes, how to be more effective and always like think about how to keep adding value to, to our customers, right?

And once we started like working with so many projects, we realized that a lot of the transformation that we've been bringing to companies, once you see that these companies are effective in the usage of flat Earth, the constraint was the backend development. Like, oh, the backend is retain, whether it's a microservices architecture or monolithic or whatever, then you realize that the front end team and team is going really fast thanks to like Flyer, thanks to Dart, thanks to all the automation that we put in place and all those things, but all the sudden you feel like, oh, my backend team is like one week, two weeks behind what we wanted to do. Even if we create like fake contracts or stops or mocks to serve the application, we're always kind of like holding ourselves back.

That means that frontend developers we're interested in learning, how can I contribute back to the backend? And then we have the same issue that we have before from I'm an iOS and Android developer, and all of a sudden now you're like, I know flatter for the front end, but I have to learn Ruby, but I have to learn Ling or Java or Sea Shark, right? And that created, again, like that idea of like the front end teams, right?

Like the, the of the day, the product we put out there, there's always a constraint that is preventing companies to go faster. That's what we wanted to solve with darro. Um, we knew already that we were coaching and working with a lot of companies in feeling comfortable with darting Flatter.

And what we realized is like, okay, now that they wanna do the jump and participate in like backend, uh, development, find the APIs at that level, maybe introduce some sort of like, uh, back and forth front ends, right? So they can connect with some other core APIs. What they don't have is the same tools that they're already comfortable with on the front end.

So therefore was our approach to make sure that that doesn't happen again, that we can go fast independent, or like whether we're working on the front end or on the back end of our, of our system, right? So that road was born out of a necessity, was born out of a way for us to think how can we move faster and still shift safer, right? Like, we don't want to jeopardize the confidence that our clients or like our, our releases we're putting in the market, as I said, like that back in the day was thought to be a replacement of JavaScript.

So they already built a lot of like core tools, uh, to be that replacement like shelf, that it would be the key element of Express JS for, for the, for the node world, right? Uh, so darro just takes those core tools and introduces an opinionated way of building APIs. We try to reduce the amount of time you need to spend architecture in order defining those APIs, right?

Uh, just by providing a very small a p i footprint when it comes to learning the tool, but allowing you to build like very strong APIs, right? So that for, for example, uh, it's built on top of of that. So you get all the like compilation and performance that you get on, on the client side as well.

It allows you to utilize, utilize a lot of the code that you wrote for the front end. You can use it on the backend as well. And the way you have to design your APIs is like all like fail based infrastructure.

So if you want to have like a a P I that read books slash details or whatever, instead of having to create your router and control all those things, you simply define your folder being like books slash details. Then you have like your details, that dark file and that will respond to whatever request comes from from the client. So it's been a, a tool that we've proven.

Um, we've been working with Dark Frog for the last 18 months. 0, but for example, it's already working at scale in two major projects that are open source as well. The first one being the FLATTERED News toolkit.

Um, so the flattered toolkit, it is a shared initiative between the Flatter team and Google News to provide like, uh, some sort of like white label approach to whatever, uh, news organization in the world that they wanna go native with their applications, but might not have the resources to maintain like a full development team, right? So, uh, that, that for proves to be very effective in that area because it's kind of like that middle ledger that allows you to connect with whatever legacy systems you might have in your organization to serve a client as well. The other, uh, big project that is open source as well was for last, like this year's Google io where we build in collaboration with the ryt, the IO flip game.

And like the beauty about those Google IO projects is like within a matter of days you go from zero users to millions of users and Dark Rock Scale without a problem. There was no hiccups, no issues. And IO Flip proved to be a success during Google io, which that gave us the confidence to be like, okay, now we can prove that this can run not only as a small project, but at scale, supporting millions of users without a problem has proven to be effective for teams.

Let's get through the finish line, let's finish all the developer experiences, kind of like, um, bits and pieces that we wanted to finish to call it a one that are release. So I'm very proud of the team because they did an amazing job and now we are in that moment of celebrating, but also thinking about the potential of the tool itself. Wow.

So 18 Monin, I mean the obvious thing is thinking about what's next, you know, next releases and stuff like that. Updates. So for people out here who maybe want to go check it out, get started, where do they go?

What's the on-ramp look like? So, uh, they can go to very good that Ventures, that's kind of like our agency website. But given that we have, and this is something that doesn't happen in the agency world that much, but we have a team just dedicated to tooling and open source approaches, right?

As I said, like Dark Frog is not the only tool that comes and is born out of a necessity. Uh, we have things like very good c l i, very good analysis that again, we wanna make sure that we always add value in all the projects that we have in flight. So we find a special place dedicated for kind like developer tools and the developer community called Bgv Death.

Um, so if you go there, you will see fr being highlighted, but you will have access to all the different tools that very Good Ventures produces that they've proven to be super useful for, for the flatter community. But like again, flatter is just the here and now. We are always trying to kind of like, uh, make that mark much higher, um, than we do now.

Excellent. Jorge, I want to thank you for coming on and making us a little bit smarter about very good ventures and Dart and Dark Frog as well as flutter. Keep up the great work, man.

Come back and keep us posted, okay? Absolutely. Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure talking to you. It's been my pleasure to have you on. Jorge Coka, head of engineering of very good ventures, talking to us about the release of Dart Frog, uh, unifying the Dart and Flutter tech stack.

Check it out. We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong. We'll be right back.