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Comment by teaearlgraycold | Hacker News Reader

Any time I see a product like Firebase that rolls auth and other major features into a database I roll my eyes.

Are you saying that because you fundamentally just don’t believe the db is a good place for auth, or because these low-code frameworks tend to roll it in and as such you see a lot of low quality implementations of auth from these systems simply because using them is within reach of someone who has no idea what they are doing?

To me it’s important to make this disambiguation. One take says that auth in db itself is a problem. The other take says “auth in db is a symptom of low code garbage”

I like to separate concerns. Unix philosophy and all that. That was the primary concern on my mind when writing my comment above.

I think the feature is there not necessarily because it’s the best technical idea but instead because of its ability to pull in less educated developers. That makes sense financially because there are fewer people out there with a higher degree of expertise. But from my perspective it shows that it’s not meant for me.

FWIW firebase auth and firebase DB are two separate things, and you can use them completely separately. However "Firebase" is a PaaS so I see how it gets confusing.

Fair call out but if I am a firebase customer, as I have been in the past but less frequently so, I treat them as a singular entity. In other words, there’s no situation I would use firebase and not use its auth, because the reason I might use firebase is Because Of the auth, not In Spite Of. There’s no world for me where firebase is the preferred option that doesn’t use auth, the integration like that is literally the only reason I would ever consider ClosedSourceOwnedByGoogle over alternatives

Convex has been quite good so far

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