# From Self-Taught to Google Engineer: Navigating the Flutter Ecosystem

> Rody Davis on teaching himself to code, building Pocket Piano in Flutter, and his work on Google's Antigravity platform, on Very Good Engineering.

- Source: https://verygood.ventures/podcasts/rody-davis-self-taught-to-google/
- Published: 2026-04-23
- Speakers: Rody Davis
- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiNrQ6svgGw

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Jorge Coca talks with Rody Davis, a Senior Developer Advocate at Google, about a coding journey that started far from any traditional path. Growing up without developers around him, Rody found his way in while stuck with a tedious manual process at work, discovering Google Apps Script and using it to automate calendar events and forms. That first taste of solving real problems with code set everything else in motion.

Rody describes teaching himself through books and online tutorials, then moving into mobile development out of a desire to build music apps. Inspired by an Apple keynote featuring a self-taught coder, he learned iOS development with Swift before frustration with maintaining separate iOS and Android codebases led him to Flutter. His first Flutter project, a music app prototype, came together in about six weeks, far faster than his native work, and grew into Pocket Piano, which earned him recognition in the Flutter Create contest.

The conversation turns to Rody's current work on Antigravity, Google's multi-agent development platform. He explains what makes it distinct: an intuitive IDE that feels familiar to VS Code users, the ability to manage multiple agents working on different tasks at once, and tight integration with Google services. Throughout, Rody returns to the themes that carried his career, self-education, persistence, and staying engaged with the developer community.