jamest

You can sign up for our climate newsletter + company updates + occasional asks for help!

https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...

My framing for this: We are the sum total of our thoughts. Letting someone/something else direct them isn't how I wanted to live.

I recently purchased a light phone[1], which has been helpful in disconnecting. I have the option to leave my smartphone at home and I'm still reachable via a regular phone call.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/

note: I'm in no way affiliated w/Light Phone

Yes: https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase

(Some quick context for those not aware of the initial incident: In May we fixed two bugs in our pricing pipeline that caused some users to see price increases.

Bug 1: we under-reported bandwidth (in particular SSL overhead)

Bug 2: we were not enforcing quotas for all accounts.

For most users, the fixes had little-to-no impact. For a few users who were using the Realtime Database with large volumes of small reads and writes, the impact was large. You could mitigate this impact by updating your client code, but unfortunately a user who had shipped code to their IoT devices couldn’t. This user was also simultaneously forced to upgrade to the Blaze pay-as-you-go plan due to quota enforcement on our $25/mo Flame plan. These combined resulted into a large billing increase for this user. We weren’t quick enough to provide this user with credits due to poor internal communication).

To address these we have (1) worked to make billing more transparent on Realtime Database and (2) are working on improving support.

1a. We rewrote our documentation to add more detail on billing mechanics and how to optimize bandwidth (https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/usage/billing).

1b. We rewrote the documentation for our profiler tool which was confusing to many developers (https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/usage/profile).

1c. We now have better alerting for if/when we find errors in our codebase that can impact their bill (up or down).

1d. We will soon be releasing (spoiler alert) a new monitoring API to let developers directly analyze their database billing and performance data.

2a. We raised the quota on free technical questions from 5 => 10. Questions on accounts/billing/bug reports are still unlimited

2b. We worked to increase Support CSAT. It is up by 15% since the billing issue in May.

Finally, the new database we’re launching today, Cloud Firestore, has daily budgets. You can use these to set exactly how much you’re willing to spend per day (more here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/usage#limits) We’ve also got extensive pricing docs: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/pricing

I hope this answers your question!

[Firebase founder] To offer better querying, improve the data model, and increase scalability we had to build an entirely new database. The original technical choices we made as a startup weren't able to support the featureset Cloud Firestore has. Even if we tried to improve upon the existing Realtime Database product, we would have had to make breaking changes that would have required you to rewrite your code (and likely shipped a worse product).

Regarding deprecation: you can be comfortable continuing to build on the Realtime Database. We don't intend to deprecate either database, since both are useful in different situations, depending on what you're building. We recommend using the Realtime Database for a number of usecases[1]

We're not posting a "Realtime Database will be supported for X years" statement because many may interpret this as "the Realtime Database is deprecating in X years", which isn't the case.

[1] https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/10/cloud-firestore-for-...

[Firebase founder] This new database has been in the works for 2.5 years, since shortly after we joined Google. It was developed in close collaboration with the Cloud Datastore[1] team, and uses Google’s core database infrastructure.

We built it because we know it can be challenging to build complex apps with our original database -- Firebase Realtime Database -- where we optimized for ease-of-use & real-time sync over querying functionality. For more info, see this comparison between the two[2].

This is a open beta launch, so the product has limitations[3] you should be aware of. We’ll be working to remove/raise these before General Availability.

A note on naming: Firebase launched in 2012[4] with a single product, the original database. As we added products (Firebase Auth / Firebase Hosting / etc), we began calling the original product ‘Firebase Realtime Database’, or RTDB for short. If you haven’t followed us lately, we’ve grown to become Google’s app platform, and now have 16 products to help you build/grow apps.

We’re grateful for the support HN has given us over the years and we hope you enjoy Cloud Firestore!

[1] https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ [2] https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/rtdb-vs-firestore [3] https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877

Thanks for the comment

Yes, we don't reply on Twitter since it became difficult to operate across multiple channels as we scaled.

I've just updated our Twitter bio to make it clear where to go for support:

http://twitter.com/firebase

Both Fabric & Firebase (pre-acqusition) had great support cultures. I think we have a good shot at improving how Google approaches support for Firebase.

The proof will be in the results. Hopefully we can share those in the future.

There was a couple of pieces of news:

1. We're merging Digits into Firebase Authentiation

2. In the future, Crashlytics will be replacing Firebase Crash Reporting to become the default crash reporting tool in Firebase.

Hopefully this gives an idea of where we're going.

[other Firebase founder] It was painful to read the article[1] this morning, especially since I was one of the people responsible for dropping the ball on getting Home Automation the credit to cover the overage a few weeks ago. We're working with the founder to make sure he's in a better spot. If you have similarly serious issues, my email is: james@firebase.com

To address a couple of points that have been raised:

1. We're aware that as we've integrated with Google our support response time & quality has decreased. I'm working with our team to do better.

2. We know better querying and web offline are needed for the Realtime Database, stay tuned.

Finally, I hope you enjoy all the new features that launched today! (https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-fireb...) Leave a comment if you have thoughts/comments.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409

This was sad to see.

I used to go dancing at "Funky Mondays" during college in Madison and loved the soul he put into his music.

Thanks for sharing. I'll pass this on.

[Firebase Founder/PM]

The Firebase Auth product existed before Firebase joined Google. We've upgraded it significantly, pulling in lots from Identity Toolkit. While we're not at full parity yet, I'd love to hear what's missing for you. There are lots of net-new features we've added [1]

The cost is free for unlimited users (same as Identity Toolkit) [2]

I'm sorry to hear you've had a poor experience with our docs, feel free to respond here or get in touch (james@firebase.com) and let me know how we can improve.

[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/toolkit/migrate-fireb...

[2] https://firebase.google.com/pricing/

[Firebase Founder] The combination of the two is meant to help you maximize ad revenue.

Since Firebase has a free & unlimited analytics product, you can see your AdMob stats in the same place as your other analytics data.

From a conceptual point-of-view, the Firebase SDKs are now the place Google puts 'core mobile offerings', AdMob is one of those

[Firebase founder]

We hear you on both counts.

FWIW the 2.x JS SDK was available unminified (see: https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase-debug.js). With our expansion launch at Google I/O we had to upgrade our serving infra -- along with virtually everything else -- and haven't added the capability back in to 3.x yet.

The closed source SDKs feedback is something we hear frequently. Unfortunately I can't give you anything better than 'hang tight' at the moment.

Being 'anti-developer' is the antithesis of the Firebase ethos. We strive to be as developer friendly as we can. There are areas where we're not doing a good enough job right now and we're actively working to get better.

I hope that helps add some color

We launched AngularFire2 into beta at ng-conf earlier this month:

https://github.com/angular/angularfire2

[posting on behalf of my colleague @ Google]

Hi everyone, Google Product Manager for Maps APIs here. We are not revoking Routebuilder’s access to the Maps API. Unfortunately, we mistakenly sent a letter to Routebuilder saying that they were in violation of the Google Maps API terms of service. This was an error. Once the developer contacted us about this issue, we replied apologizing for the misunderstanding and confirming that we would not be revoking his access to the Maps API. (He contacted us on Friday, we replied on Monday, the blog post was published on the weekend.)

We’re really glad he let us know so we could fix the issue and we encourage any developers that have issues in future to reach out to us so we can help. Developers who want to contact the Google Maps APIs team: Stack Overflow and our issue tracker forum (https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/) are both monitored by the Google Maps team weekly.

Firebase does have offline support for iOS/Android[1]. Web support is coming.

[1] https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-o...

[Firebase Cofounder] The reason <your_app>.firebaseapp.com sites are free and custom domains are $5/mo with Firebase Hosting is HTTPS-only. Our cost-of-goods-sold includes auto-provisioning the SSL cert for the domain.

Part of our philosophy is providing services that work well, and hopefully better, together. Our realtime database only accepts SSL connections and doing the same with Hosting means when you build on Firebase your whole app is encrypted by default.

We're excited to use Divshot's tech make Firebase Hosting even better going forward.

Firebase has a similar style guide:

https://www.firebase.com/docs/styleguide.html

[Firebase founder] There is a Firebase C# SDK on the way. We've had some other things, that we've been working on for the last year, that are shipping in the next few weeks which have taken priority. After that, we'll be shifting focus to new SDKs (they're a little complicated and take a bit of time to build)

You can get a 'prettier' version by removing .json entirely:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek

[Firebase founder here] This is pretty exciting for us, we're glad kogir, dang, kevin and sctb chose to expose HN's data through Firebase. We're seen quite a few startups (and big companies like Nest) do this, since building, maintaining, and documenting a public API often isn't a easy task.

Mozilla, the corporate backer of Persona, decided to end new feature development on it because of low adoption. Because of this, and very low usage numbers on our end, we decided to remove support.

Kudos to Auth0 for creating this site. The education, awareness and graphical debugger are great. Thank you!

We (Firebase) use JWTs to integrate with an existing app's userbase[1].

[1] https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/simple-login/custom....

Thanks! Glad you had a good experience!

Whoops, thanks. Will push out a change soon!

[Firebase CoFounder] I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. Regarding 2 & 3 - you're likely seeing interruptions due to new code deploys. We try to balance moving fast and deploying at off-peak times. Rolling deploys are coming soon and will fix this.

Regarding 1 - We only started charging a month ago.

I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with our integration software (I'm assuming you're referring to our Angular binding?) Angular is changing frequently, we work closely with the team at Google and try to keep up as fast as we can.

You definitely don't have the use Firebase. Mozilla even has their own Hub Sever you can use, or you can host your own.

Firebase makes your life easier. It's up to you if you choose to use it.