sidstling

The fact that you’re only a click away from being on the internet has something to do with it, but the political pendulum is swinging to the right and no right-winger has ever burned her bra.

I’m not trying to say that everyone has turned alt-right, or anything of the sort, but the general trend in society is increasingly conservative. With that comes more prudishness, but more importantly, higher expectations to be as expected of you and to do well. We’re far less tolerant of individual quirkyness today than we were 15 years ago, because you’re expected to be perfect, so you wouldn’t want to flaunt your flaws at the beach.

I think it’s fair to consider IRC a social tool. It’s build around small communities made up of people who both belong to and run the various rooms. So within that you have a social structure, you have familiarity and you have social hierarchies.

This is different from most “social” platforms on the modern web. Reddit, twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, instagram, hackernews and so on are all global villages, operated by a centralized organ which doesn’t really moderate. So you have anarchy, no-familiarity, no structure and no real visible hierarchy.

When you were on IRC you’d meet the same people every day, you got to know them and they you. By contrast we probably won’t ever run into each other again once we finish this specific conversation. You might not even read my post unless you specifically chose to do so.

A lot of the internet is like this now, and there is really nothing social about most social media.

You can escalate it by contacting the political leadership of the department directly.

If they failed to adhere to the law you should do so, but I’d urge you not to request access in the future unless it’s really important. Because making a request of access is one of the most expensive things you can do.

We get a few requests each year, every department does, and every time we have to dig through a number of different systems and thousands of documents to prepare stuff that’s relevant. Then we have to read through every single document to make sure there isn’t any sensitive information and manually redact it if there is, while filing a report on why we redacted to internal review.

We do this, while expected to perform our normal functions by the way. I don’t know about the Dutch, but we take every request very serious, but for me personally it’s a little disheartening to know that we could hire 10-15 extra teachers/nurses/care takers if we didn’t have to deal with requests of access done solely by private citizens who feel like they “fight the good fight”.

I mean, who are you fighting? Your own society? The press is usually ahead of you too, but they actually have the resources to process the information they request.

I think all publicly funded software should be open source. The public paid for it, they should have a right to look under the hood, like they can with almost every other piece of government.

I’m also a realist, and have you met the EU? We’ve been working on architectural standards for organizational data for almost 20 years, and it’s nowhere near finished. :p

If we can’t figure out a standard for how to define a department or employee object in a data model, then how on earth will we ever maintain a universal Linux distribution?

I think your strategy for implementation is flawed though. You really don’t want to tear the house down and build a new one when people are living in it.

I realize I’m a bit of a conservative in that sense, but people’s lives depend on our critical systems.

As far as Microsoft goes, they are a company. I think they are a great business partner in an ocean of bad ones. It goes against my personal political beliefs to use proprietary software, but the public sector isn’t primary a tech sector and we don’t operate on personal ideology. We use the best and most efficient tools, at the cheapest cost, to support our primary function.

I actually really like Azure. Orchestra and application insights have made incident support so much easier, and it’s only as lock-on as you make it.

I also worry because of the political climate. It’s extremely unlikely, that the relationship between the EU and the US will really go bad, but we have contingency plans for things you wouldn’t believe, so naturally we have one for Azure.

I’ll admit that I’m not knowledgeable about the German public sector, but I’d really love to see how they managed to save money.

I work primarily with digitization and efficiency, so I’m cursed in that I’m always thinking about cost efficiency. This is actually the primary drive behind my personal open source idealism. Since open source is customizable, we can cut away the clutter and focus on user experience and results.

But because of my background I can’t help but think about the man-hours they must have spent on the organizational implementation, and how many hundreds of millions of euro that must have cost them.

Maybe the German public sector is less digitized than we are, making the change lighter. Don’t get me wrong, we could certainly save money on licenses too. It’s just that the cost of doing it far exceeds the benefit, but I’d love to learn from Munich.

The cost of change is why I personally think hard switches (I did notice them calling it gradual on the wiki page, but I’d argue that it’s not if you swap OS before every other system is ready) are a mistake in enterprise. We’re gradually changing our plumbing to be more open, but we’re doing it so that nobody notices. Our MSSQL cluster is a good example, it’s currently necessary because of legacy software. In one or two license cycles I fully expect it to be replaced by open source however. If things go as planned then no-one on the business side is going to notice anything but the freed up funds.

It’s because it’s not really doable without tremendous effort. I work for a muniplavity in Denmark, and we’re a big participants in an open source group for public software called OS2, we’re also members of a group of municipalities that own our own ESDH software and codebase and pay private companies to support and maintain it. Our libraries operate on 100% open source with Ubuntu supported by a local company.

So we’re actually pretty progressive in terms of pushing open source while also supporting local business.

We operate more than 300 IT systems though, I’d say that around 75% of these run on windows only, many without suitable alternatives. So even on the technical side, we can’t swap our stack because our employees wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. We’re working to lower this, and stuff like web-apps and the rise of android/iOS devises has helped but it’ll probably take 25 years to happen, and here’s the thing, Azure is actually the most EU friendly, secure, stable and cost-efficient cloud platform, so a lot of those non-Microsoft software actually still run on Microsoft.

Then there is the employee training. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the primary cost of running a public organization is your employees. They are the most important resource and replacing them is really expensive. So is retraining them, and it’s also something we already struggle with in terms of IT.

Most times when we switch a system, the technical implementation will go excellent. The organizational implementation will go horrible, however, because learning how to use an IT system is hard. It’s even harder to learn how to use it efficiently and often local management will be reluctant to invest enough time or focus on what they view as IT changes, because they are already understaffed in their primary function.

Windows, android and IOS are something most people have worked with before. So is the office package, and again, where is the non-Microsoft alternative to the office365 enterprise stack? Anyway, switching people who can barely “turn on the internet” (talking of course about the browser, but that’s what you’ll literally hear every day in our support center) to open source alternatives is a tremendous effort that nobody, nobody, outside of tech wants to do.

Then there is IT, we’ve run Microsoft for decades. Our staff is trained for it, they’re certified in it and despite what you may think, they’re actually cutting edge in terms of skill. At least in my country they are, we’ve yet to find an ADFS consultant that knows more about ADFS than our guys, in fact, we’ve had to send most of them home because they weren’t able to help us. Where do we find Linux replacements for those people? And how do we pay the 25 million it would cost us to replace the ones that don’t want to work with the Linux stack?

Lastly there is support. Microsoft may have a spotty reputation in popular culture, but their support has always been top of the class to the public sector. If we file a primary incident report to Microsoft, Seattle will be on the phone with us until it’s fixed. What Linux house will offer this service? Even if we found one, I don’t think we’d really want to throw away decades of partnership with an untested entity just because.

I wish we could run European based open source software, I really do, but the truth is that it’s complicated, highly improbable and the business case isn’t even there. Because it would be really expensive, and do you really want to sacrifice welfare to run Linux? Would your political leadership?

Imposter syndrome is real. I’m educated, have worked professionally in my specific field for four years and I do side-work as an examiner at academy level (something I’m certified for). I’ll often feel like I’m not good enough when I join a new project. It’s stupid, but it’s also a real thing, and it’s not always easy to deal with.

Of course there is also being in over your head.

Try to figure out which category you’re in. Then ask yourself three questions.

What have you learned during your three weeks?

What do you still need to learn?

How can you achieve that?

Lastly I’d have an open talk with your manager. It’s his/her responsibility to get you onboard safely, and maybe it’s time to try another approach? It’ll help if you have answered the three questions, because they’re really the foundation for your way forward.

Disclaimer: I’m Danish, we may do management differently.

During the Cold War we had two government bunkers that only a handful of people knew about in my country.

30 years after the Cold War when Russia opened their soviet archives, it turned out that they were never secret at all.

I’ve been using FastMail for a year, it’s an easy switch from gmail.

The spam-filter is terrible but the support actually answers you.

I chose fastmail over proton or tutanota because they’ve been around longer and charge everyone money. Maybe I’m paranoid but I don’t trust free as in beer very much anywhere. + none of my mails would actually use the encryption.

I had a change denied because I didn’t attach open source evidence, so it was my fault, but because it got contested I couldn’t just redo the change.

An account vetting system would solve this. Being an official municipality it’s kind of silly that we can change the actual direction of a street, but not use our internal maps as evidence for it. ;)

I only meant to compare them in the sense that they are both really good at getting a working prototype up and running fast.

You’re absolutely right that this requires knowledge of packages for node/js. We haven’t been using a whole lot of modules to achieve this, but we certainly haven’t used just Node/JS either.

Almost every, and probably every, language that has been used for serious production is relevant in 2018. COBOL is still one of the most important languages in the belly of a lot of financial and public software.

You wouldn’t build something new on cobol if you could avoid it of course, but rails is not cobol. Ruby and rails are still good at getting things out the door.

I wouldn’t personally touch it, but that’s because I’ve never heard about anyone using it in my country. If you live in a place where a lot of shops use ruby and rails, then why not?

Changing tech isn’t easy, so you should only do it if you’re motivated. We’ve been doing more and more JS/Node where I work because it’s really good at getting things done quickly, sort of similar to why you’d chose ruby and rails. However I’ve been a C# developer for years, and I’m nowhere near as good in the JS environment as I am in .Net. I’ll get there eventually of course, but I probably wouldn’t without the internal motivation of actually enjoying the change, partly because JS is so great at getting things done.

The key questions to me when chosing a language would be, do I really want to learn it? Why do I want to learn it? And also, is anyone in my area hiring for it?.

Why wouldn’t it have a future? We use it quite a lot in the European public sector where we can’t use google maps because of privacy issues.

We’ve written a small app that does route calculations for us to make reporting business related driving (you get a refund, but that has to be taxed in specific ways) an automated process. We use OSM in that, but we do pay a company to do the routing algorithm and supply the data in a way that doesn’t abuse the standard OSM api. I’m not sure exactly how they do that, I think they host part of OSM or something like that. There is a big industry for small companies which are specialized in those things in Europe, and they are typically cheaper and easier to use than google.

We also rely heavily on OSM in our GIS department, where we have our own private maps, though they aren’t so much for traffic we have been building our own “street-view” thing, using OSM and our own 360 images.

The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. Which is a huge issue if you rely on it for something serious. That hasn’t been an issue for us for two years though, but we did have one week where an elected official couldn’t submit his driving because of a wrong one-way street.

We have, I haven’t personally done any of it in production because I didn’t really see a reason to use it over node. My coworkers did a few pocs though, and initially had to spend a lot of time actually getting it to work with deployment. I have no idea why that was, you’d expect it to just work considering it’s a complete Microsoft setup, but it didn’t work out.

So it was a terribly expensive poc, because our most expensive resource is the time developers/operations spend. I mean, core is more performant than node technically, but as far as cost-efficiency goes, time to market is just much more important than technical performance in our organization. We have a lot of iron, and we don’t have a lot of users. We’re a muniplacity of average size after all, the most simultaneous visitors we’ve ever had across every system we operate is in the tens of thousands.

As far as development goes, I don’t think there is much difference between core and standard, but I’ll admit that I haven’t looked into it since 1.0.

We’re in this weird spot where we’re using more and more powershell and azure orchestration for back-end services that used to be powered by C#. A lot of that has also moved from development to operations, so that development is mainly focused on building APIs, working with data-sets or building various minor web/mobile apps, and Node + JS is just working out better than everything else.

We’ve tried core, we’ve tried Django and flask, we’ve tried a bunch of other stuff, but for getting an app up and running the same hour you start building it? Well, node just works for us.

I’m not saying node or JS are better than .Net though, I don’t think it is and I’d still prefer Java or C# if I was building something major.

I’m not so sure about that. I see node getting more and more traction these days. In 2012 it was a hipster tech, in 2018 it’s actually starting to see its way into production. At least around here, my own place included.

We’re a .net shop, like half the country I live in, but I could’ve written a somewhat similar story as the author. Not exactly similar, I don’t think NPM is really better than maven or nuget and coming from .net, the IDEs for JS are certainly weaker than they are for .Net.

The reason we’re doing more and more JS, and using node, is because of how fast it produces stuff that works.

It’s simply faster to write the same functionality with JS and node than it is in .net, and it gives us the advantage of only using one language for back-end, front-end and mobile. Which is extremely useful for a small team in an enterprise setup.

It also works everywhere. We’re a .net shop like I said, that means we run on IIS, which can be done with other techs than .net through stuff like fastcgi, but have you ever tried setting that up and keeping it up-to-date? I have, and really showed me how little of an operations guy I am because it was horrible. IIS-node on the other hand worked out the box.

It’s a little ironic, but it’s now easier for us to deploy Node apps than .net apps because .net apps often need different configuration on the IIS than it does on your development box and Node works exactly the same.

It’s mostly the easy, fast part that does it for us though, and not so much the language or node itself. We’re simply more productive when we’re using Node.

Of course you need a lot of governance with the JS stack, but you honestly need that for any tech, and we already had pretty strict rules in place for how we write things in .net.

Disclaimer, it’s entirely possible that we are not as good at .net as we think. It’s also possible that I’m noticing Node in more places than I did in 2012, or 2016 for that matter, places because I’m more focused on it now that we use it in production. Node is a rising trend throughout my network though, with more and more people picking it up for stuff that isn’t just weekend projects.

A lot of the failures I experience at born from trying to solve business process problems with digitization, or digitization without ever asking if it’s the right thing/way to do stuff. Another common problem is focusing too much on a particular set of business processes and forgetting that every IT system is part of a package of numerous IT systems that work together.

I live in one of the most digitized countries in the world. So we’ve naturally digitized payment for public transportation. When we did it, nobody questioned the taxation system, even though it was made in the 70ies and build around a public structure called “amter” that hadn’t actually existed for many years when then system was build. We had also gone from 271 municipalities to 98 and their borders were part of the taxation too. So the taxation rules frankly didn’t make any sense and they were needlessly complicated, yet they were digitized, as is. Naturally it was a disaster, it was even predicted by the technical team and the project leads, but nobody wanted to touch the taxation politically. It got fixed eventually, but it could have been several hundreds of million danish kroner cheaper if they had simply redone the taxation models for ticket prices before the digitization.

So that’s one mistake, and a common one, both in the public and private sectors. The other common disaster is building systems for specific processes without looking at the bigger picture. Like a case working system that handles the welfare process for people who are sick. Except you forget that those citizens sometimes don’t go through official communication channels, and maybe send a letter or an email to the wrong department, so you need to be able to add those documents to their digital case file. But that’s not possible and neither is sending a notice to other systems in other departments which also deal with the same citizen. I’m guessing this last issue is bigger in the public sector than in private, because we often buy our software from companies that have very little actual domain knowledge outside of what their direct customers tell them, and the case workers they use for knowledge very often lack insights in the greater architecture of running 350+ IT systems together because they work with maybe 5 of them.

I mean, these things aren’t deadly as the x-ray machine, but they’ve been happening for the better part of 25 years and nobody seem to have really learnt anything.

And the error completely takes focus away from the point, which was about causality.

My only defense is that classical history was a 5ECTS course during my first year and I never actually finished the full five years before I went into CS. I should’ve obviously looked it up before posting to HN though.

As a little ironic/funny side note, the reason I changed to CS was because I was really bored by the fact that I had spent two years mainly learning how to work with source material and scientific methods, which wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped “history” would be. Now that just bit me in the ass, again. ;p

Except nobody is going to listen, and you can’t really do reliable prediction, but mostly, nobody will listen. I studied history before I went into computer science, and it’s taught me some useful skills.

Mostly it’s taught me that things are always more complex than they seem. Like, if you zoom out and see history, events make sense. Augustus chose Christianity as the state religion of Rome because it was a great tool to unify the different cultures under emperorial rule. Then when you actually look at why that made sense, you’re at a loss, because it makes sense in the grand picture, but the actual decision makes no damn sense. They had a myriad of religions to chose from, so why exactly did they chose the one they did? Nobody knows, and if you put yourself in the same situation, ignoring everything that came after, you’d probably have a hard time justifying it. Yet it’s one of the most significant decisions in western civilization. That’s just one example, and I probably worded it a little poorly, English isn’t my first language, but knowing things are complex is a real relief, because you’ll rarely get the feeling that people or systems are intentionally out to get you.

Another thing it’s taught me is to be more positive, or at least less doomsaying. I’m liberal and nationalism being on the rise isn’t exactly great news to me, but because I know history, I know there is a pendulum at work, and it’ll eventually swing the other way again.

Sure things typically suck in regions of the world, but they’ve never sucked everywhere at once, and frankly, we’ve mostly seen progression since we started recoding history, and that’s really comforting, to me at least.

I think it would be nice if we could apply this, I just don’t know how we would do that.

It’s not personalized trash cans, it’s public ones at streets and beaches.

You wouldn’t really need IoT in the trash can if it’s emptied on a schedule, but a lot of public trash cans see very different usage amounts over the year.

As for durability, well, people destroy them. Your average public trash can at a park or a beach could need replacement several times during a summer thanks to things like one-usage grills. ;) In those cases the IoT device has the added advantage of being able to warn the fire department.

I disagree with this. I think you can find facts in most parts of life. What has changed is how we use those facts to try and build a narrative, by chosing the facts that support the story we want to tell and ignore the facts that don’t.

Anti-vaxers are a good example of this. They’ve read that vaccines are dangerous, which is actually a fact, so they chose to not vaccinate their children. But they are ignoring another vaccination fact in the process. The fact that not-vaccinating children is more dangerous than vaccinating them. As a result we now live in a world where westerners are once again dying from the measles even though they really shouldn’t be.

Politicians are especially great at misusing facts to build their agendas. Possibly because they’d be too agreeing if they weren’t and they simply don’t know how to work together across party lines.

I once saw a climate change meme, asking if you’d cross a bridge which 99.9% of the worlds leading engineers said was unsafe. Every day we see more and more people cross that damn bridge. :p

I also agree with you though. Because things are this way, it would often be more reasonable to talk about “strong beliefs” rather than “facts”, exactly because people are chosing to ignore the facts.

I did specifically say it wasn’t technically the languages fault, but you certainly have a point. I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to bring in SOAP even though you’re talking about the language, because I’ve almost never worked with XML without also working with SOAP. But in not completely comparing it to JSON either, I mean, I love JSON for the efficiency of transferring it between systems, so I’m not completely comparing XML/SOAP to JSON the language either.

As far as lifecycle goes, it’s not actually the SOAP call but the way the two tech stacks parse the XML that’s the problem. You can also do rest calls with livecycle, and you’ll run into the same problems trying to pass XML created by any of the standard .net libraries to it.

I agree SOAP is terrible, but part of my point is that SOAP taints XML, because it’s a really common way to transfer XML.

I do use XML in other ways of course. We get quite a few datadumps in XML, that I turn to SQL through Microsoft SSIS, and even here it’s annoying. Not so much the language, but the way it breaks your SSIS service if it’s not delivered exactly as specified in its schema. Obviously that shouldn’t happen, but it does. Sometimes a supplier delivers half a file, and everything because SSIS didn’t get the XML specified in the schematic. (The fact that this breaks this is another wonderful story, where multiple datasets gets delivered within the same XML file.)

JSON and XML are languages, as you say, but their main usage (at least for me) is transferring data between systems and techs, and that is almost always easier, simpler and safer with JSON. Maybe it’s unfair to call JSON the better language because of that, but it’s certainly more useful to me.

Danish muniplacities are installing IoT devices in a long range of things, from monitoring when a trash can is full, keeping track of parking, creating rfid tours with bits of historic-info showing up in an app as you travel around the city to monitoring high-pressure wells for leaks.

Most devices have batteries that last 5-10 years though, and often it’s the device that needs to get changed, not the battery. Like the trash can IoT devices, they’ll never actually outlive their battery. Even if a devices manages to survive its battery, 10 years is a long time, so you’d probably want to replace it regardless.

This is still a really cool article though, and it’d be silly for me to say that we’d never use it, but battery life isn’t actually a problem for us. Maybe it is in other places? And there is also the enviromental angle to consider, especially in political organizations.

I write a lot of smaller service agents, connecting legacy systems or feeding them with data in the public sector of Denmark. Most of those are done with XML and it’s often quite terrible.

We write a lot of C# but one of our tools is an old adobe lifecycle server, and .Net XML isn’t the same as Adobe XML. I mean, technically it’s just XML, but the two techs expect your XML elements to be build a certain way and break when they aren’t. So in order to make the two techs talk with each other through SOAP, we had to write a custom library to translate the .Net xml before we send it. And that’s just one in a long line of similar stories.

Hell, SOAP calls en general take longer time to get running than any JSON rest service call I’ve ever set up. Even when the XML interprets the same on both ends, though I’m not sure why that is exactly.

So it’s fair to say that I love JSON. The article outlines it as being easier to read, and there is certainly that, but for me it’s the efficiency.

Working with JSON never takes longer than it should.

It’s an interesting story, though also tragic and frightening. I probably would’ve lead with reason five. It seems to me that abusing holes, in employee safety laws for disabled people, is one of the worse evils they commit.

I wonder how much of this goes around. Recently it was revealed that a local restaurant in Aarhus, Denmark, that put disabled and mentally ill to work on a type of welfare program where the municipality pays part of the wage for people who can’t work full hours, was also abusing their employees for profit. And that just another story in a long line of these.

For around ten years I didn’t read much, not because I didn’t want to, I certainly did, but because it takes too long. I get up at around 6am, get home from work at around 5pm and then I have daily chores mixed with family stuff for 3-5 hours. Not much left after that, and I’m not good at setting fixed hours for specific hobbies, so reading a whole book just didn’t work out for me.

I soon found that even if I managed to pick a book up, it’d have to be really great for me not to start questioning if it was worth the time.

I did take a few courses related to work, where I had to read books and articles, but I don’t count those because they were part of studying, so reading them had a specific purpose of getting me good grades at whatever certification/examination came with the course.

Then a few years ago I started listening to audiobooks, and it’s really changed things. Now I “read” one or two books a month. Sometimes it’s stuff like Sapiens, other times it’s the new world of Warcraft novel, but both kinds have really improved the quality of my life. I do have two hours of commute each day, where the audiobook fits in perfectly. I used to fill it with music and podcasts, but for me the books have been a huge improvement exactly because of the depth.

We actually have some internal problems with those measures in Scandinavia. I live in Denmark and politically we’re made up of 98 municipalities, some are urban, some are rural. Because we share the economic task of welfare, richer municipalities send some of their money to poorer municipalities.

A part of the calculation for this process is build around the size of your bourse, which made good sense 15-20 years ago before urbanization really took off, but makes very little sense today.

It used to be that a country manor was much more expensive than a small downtown apartment. In fact most urban areas with small apartments used to house the lower working class, while country manors used to belong to the upper class.

Today that has switched around. Poor people can literally not afford to live in our largest cities while the most rural manors are now so inexpensive that my three room apartment in our second largest city could by me two-three country manors in the cheapest parts.

We’re changing the way we calculate “citizen net worth”, but in a democracy such a thing takes a long time, so it’ll probably be a few years, and we’ve already been at it for four. And that’s in a country of 5.6 million people, just imagine how slow it’d be in the WTO.

As I understand it those forced acceptances aren’t actually GDPR compliant, and are mostly a result of bad business practices on behalf of the companies who won’t comply with EU law.

I might be wrong though, and even if I’m not, it’ll probably still take a few years to actually change because legislators move slowly.

Microsoft was a lot faster to accept and accompany our privacy terms. The EU data protection laws that you've seen all the fuzz about may be new for the private sector, but in much of the public sector we've actually been under much stricter requirements for years. If you have a big enough agreement with Microsoft, you can even have your data stored on servers you have physical access to and share with no-one else.

AWS was a little slower, but now meet the same requirements, pretty much. Other parts of the public sector is big in AWS instead of Azure.

Google only recently got into any type of real agreements with the EU on data protection, and they're still far from having national agreements. They also don't meet EU requirements on all their products, making it easier to blacklist all Google products than risk your GIS department using Google Maps or your PR department using Google analytics, both illegal for public usage.

For us personally we have more than 25 years of partnership with Microsoft, who have an excellent record on support. By contrast we've never really worked with Google, and we're not typically the ones to try new things. :) Especially not when we're happy with what we have, and since we already have a presence in Azure, I doubt we'll be expanding to another Cloud when pricing is pretty competitive between them. I mean, to run two clouds would also mean our operations crew would need to obtain security certifications for both, which is fairly expensive.

Technically and legally we could sign an agreement for Firebase in particular, and host our mobile apps with a Firebase backend, but as that's not likely to happen, Dart would need to become popular enough to integrate seamlessly and easily with Azure for us to use it.

I work for a Danish city with 60.000 inhabitants, so we're a small team, and because of that we looked into flutter since it seems like an easy way to do mobile for people apt at c-like languages. We even had some internal talks about angularDart and flutter being comparable to react and reactNative.

Our proof of concept wasn't that much of a hit though. Flutter integrates really, really well with Firebase, but being the public sector in Europe, I don't see us using Google cloud anytime soon. Without it we couldn't really get a full stack dart thing running because stuff like aqueduct isn't mature enough, and is really hard to run within Azure. At least if you want to run comparable to other options seeing how application insights even works on Node.

Dart is a nice language, and Flutter is certainly an easy way to do mobile apps, but I don't see us using either, unless they becomes much more popular.