AiA 262: Firebase Features with David East from Adventures in Angular

Adventures in Angular

Charles M Wood

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AiA 262: Firebase Features with David East

28 minutes Posted Oct 29, 2019 at 3:00 am.

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In this episode of Adventures in Angular the panel has fun interviewing David East about Firebase. David starts by sharing what it was like at the recent Firebase Summit in Madrid. There were so many announcements they had a tough time fitting them all into the one-hour keynote address.

One of the cool new features announced at the Firebase Summit is Firebase Extension, David describes it as serverless without any code. The panel discusses this feature and how it works. Another cool feature announced is Google Analytics for Firebase. This allows you to use Firebase tools in conjunction with Google Analytics. The panel considers the smart things you can do in your app with this feature.

The next feature the panel discusses is Remote Config which allows you to store data and then pull out that information on demand. If you use the Google Analytics for Firebase you can target specific data for certain audiences. David explains that before this could only be done with native apps. He also explains how in doing this you no longer have to worry about the gtag loader and defines gtag for the panel.

The panel gets a little off track as David jokingly explains his beef with Aaron Frost, Frosty. Frosty host My Angular Story and a while back had twitted looking for awesome angular stories. David had responded but never heard back from Frosty. Frosty jokingly says he faxed an invite to David. The panel jokes about how awesome David’s episode will be and tells everyone to look out for his episode.

Getting back on track, David gives more examples of ways to use the Remote Config feature on with the Google Analytics for Firebase. Frosty confesses he needs to get better at looking at analytics. Sharing an example from a company he is currently working for, Frosty explains how they made nearly 2 million dollars just by changing the color of a button. The panel considers how minor changes like that can make such a big difference and how analytics helps you target your audience.

David shares the story behind writing Angular Fire. Jeff Cross worked on the angular team and started writing angular fire but then left for Nrwl. After Jeff left, David took over and ended up rewriting the entire library. He explains some of the mistakes that they made that led to the rewrite and how he fixed them.

The panel wonders at David about using Angular Fire and NgRX. David tells the panel that the Firebase console uses NgRx under the hood and shares what he learned while working on it. Using firebase and NgRx can be very confusing because of the mass duplication of responsibility. David’s advice is to let Firebase and NgRx do their own thing and connect the dots with RxJs.

David discusses Firestore, a very advanced caching system and what you can do with it. Including, working offline and setting security rules. Frosty brings up Firebase Messaging Cues, he explains that it is similar to three-way messaging cues except its n-way. David explains that even though he is intrigued by the idea, he does not approve of the name. The panel considers possible use cases for an n-way messaging cue. David explains some of the costs and benefits of this architecture.

The episode ends with a discussion of Firebase’s documentation, which is currently a group of markdown files. David defends the simplicity of this documentation style and gives recommendations and resources for those who need more help.

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