Tom Arra

Founding Operations Lead at Shorebird

Tom Arra is a seasoned product and engineering leader with over 15 years of experience delivering high-impact mobile applications at scale. Currently at Shorebird, he plays a cross-functional role supporting Flutter developers with tools to ship faster and more reliably. Prior to Shorebird, Tom led product development at Very Good Ventures, where he helped scale the global Flutter consultancy’s operations and drove strategic initiatives including toolchain innovation and software development process improvement. Tom’s background includes leadership roles at BMW Technology Corporation, where he was part of the team which launched and scaled the MyBMW/MINI mobile apps across global markets using Flutter. He also brings product and engineering experience from Microsoft and Nokia. Tom is passionate about helping teams build better software through the right mix of process, tooling, and user-focused design.

Flutter Best Practices: State Management & Scalability

What are the limitations of current state management solutions (Provider, Riverpod, Bloc, etc.) when dealing with complex, real-time data and large application states? What are the pros and cons of different state management solutions in Flutter? What are your strategies for debugging and optimizing state-related performance issues in Flutter apps? How could state management be improved to better handle asynchronous data and complex user interactions?