Congrats to Iiro, our new GDE for Flutter!

8.6.2018

Our mobile developer, Iiro Krankka, just officially joined a small handful of people as a Google Developer Expert for Flutter! Iiro joins the limited group of 8 Flutter GDEs globally, and to our knowledge, is one of a kind in Scandinavia.

The team at Codemate is so proud of you, Iiro! Congratulations!

Iiro, now that you’re a Flutter GDE, how does it feel like?

It’s pretty amazing! I’ve already celebrated it during the week since I knew about the result before it got official. It was quite hard for me to be hush-hush about it before it came official today.

Really excited to announce that I'm officially joining a small handful of people as a Google Developer Expert for Flutter!

Thanks everyone for the support, and shoutout to @CodemateLtd for letting me play with @flutterio early on during work hours between projects!
— Iiro Krankka (@koorankka) 8. kesäkuuta 2018

But what exactly is a Google Developer Expert?

The Google Developer Experts page has a good explanation on what it is:

GDEs are experienced, recognized developers of Google technologies as well as outstanding professionals in product strategy, UX/UI, marketing, growth hacking and monetization.

They distinguish themselves through frequently speaking at conferences, share their passion and experience by publishing videos and tutorials, writing code samples, mentoring developers and startups and much more.

In a nutshell, Google recognized me as an expert and a significant community member for one of their technologies, in this case, Flutter. I went through a community interview, an interview with an existing GDE and a Google employee working in the Flutter team.

Where did you hear about Flutter?

Like all good things that happen in this world, it all started a year ago when I was getting päntsdrunk on one Saturday evening.

I was browsing YouTube, and this talk by Eugenio Marletti & Sebastiano Poggi came up in my recommended videos. I already knew Eugenio, who is an active member of the Android & Kotlin community, and in this talk he was talking about Flutter. The talk was impressive and I ended up giving Flutter a try right after it.

After a couple of weeks, I was in love. Having a quite long native Android development background, I felt Flutter was a breath of fresh air.

How did you then become a Flutter GDE?

Shortly after getting my feet wet with Flutter, I started to write a blog sharing cool things that I learned about it. Fast-forward to now; I’ve done quite a lot of articles, sample apps, a couple of plugins, official documentation for the Flutter site, pull requests to the main repo and lots of other things.

A few people from Google reached out to me during Google I/O and told that I would be a good fit for a Flutter GDE. After the lengthy application process, here I am! I think that me being an early adopter and having one of the first Flutter blogs helped. The blog had a more substantial relative impact when the Flutter community was still quite small.

Any tips for those that would like to become a GDE?

Know your technology well, share what you’ve learned with others, make an impact on the community and have fun! Loving what you do and sharing your knowledge helps a lot. If you do everything right, Google or an existing GDE will recommend and contact you to become a GDE – you usually can’t apply to become one by yourself.

Now, it’s time to party!