Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Firebase party on June 4th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world.
We're excited to once again throw a party for our community at this year's conference. If you're going to be in town, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, meet engineers and product leads from the Firebase team, and relax after the first day of WWDC.
We look forward to hearing about all the cool stuff you've been working on.
When: Monday, June 4th, 2018
Time: 8:00pm - 12:00am
Where: The GlassHouse
Price: Free (!)
Tickets are limited so request your invite today! (Note: a confirmed ticket is required for entry)
As a Developer Advocate with the Firebase team, one of the fun things I get to do is travel around the world to talk about Firebase and run hackathons for developers. As I reflect on these experiences, it seems to me that the participants at these events have different reasons for being there, and different categories of project ideas.
If you read along here, I’ll encourage you to think about which categories you belong to, or maybe you’re in a category of your own! Then, after you’re done, why don’t you follow this link to Twitter polls where you can tell us how you fit in. I’m curious to see the results!
Of course, prizes are a pretty obvious motivator to participate in an event like a hackathon that can take all day and require some fairly difficult work. At DevFest Hamburg 2017 we ran a Firebase AppFest (that’s a lot of fest-ing, yeah?) and I was surprised to see some fantastic prizes:
The winning team at that event was ecstatic to win, I was told this was an especially big deal because the Pixel 2 was not available in their home country. So, kudos to that team, and enjoy your new phones!
I’m here to learn!
Another motivator for participation in a hackathon is the opportunity to learn new technologies. These folks are not necessarily in it for the prizes - the reward is the knowledge and experience gained from working on a project idea with others. Firebase hackathons are indeed a great place to learn, because the Firebasers present at the event are effectively on-call to answer questions, and get folks unstuck with whatever problems might come up. At AnDevCon DC this year, we held a Firebase + Android Things hackathon, which was a great opportunity for participants to learn about two Google developer technologies at the same time. I was inspired by everyone’s work on this, so I chose to work with Firebase on Android Things during our internal “Firebase Hackweek”. This “doorbell” is what we made.
It turns out that we Firebasers also learn a lot from these events. If there’s something unclear in the documentation, or some API doesn’t work the way you’d initially expect, that becomes real and actionable feedback that we can take to the product teams to further improve the developer experience. And that’s something we take seriously.
I’m here to build with friends!
It comes as no surprise to me that spending time with friends on a shared experience is the only reason you might need to show up at a hackathon. I saw a lot of this at SM Hacks, an event for high school students. I saw many teams there simply enjoying each other’s company while figuring out what to build and how to build it. So many fun and goofy hacks came out of that!
Now here’s the second question I’d like to ask. It’s about how you choose what you want to work on.
This might be the most common type of hacker I’ve seen. Personal hackers build things that they would like to use themselves. I fall squarely into this category most of the time. The main reason I got into mobile development was the idea of programming the little computer in my pocket that I carry around with me everywhere, making it do things that are useful to me.
Some of the useful hacks I’ve seen powered by Firebase are a chord transposer, a to-do manager, and a medication reminder app.
I’m an “opportunity hacker”!
If you see a need in the world for a specific kind of app, then I’ll call you an “opportunity hacker”. I saw this a lot in Manila where we conducted a hackathon for the Firebase support staff. Many of the teams focused on very practical, real-world needs, and built an order-ahead food app, reward points trackers (two teams did this!), and a hardware inventory tracker. These are ideas that could live beyond the end of a hackathon, and become actual services that earn money.
I’m a “technical hacker”!
Technical hackers like projects that explore connections between technologies and solve known technical problems in new ways. Probably the best example I’ve seen of this was the winning project at the Bangkok Firebase AppFest - a Kotlin chatbot that lets you type Kotlin code into it, it evaluates the code using a Google Cloud backend, and sends back the response. I’m not sure I would have ever been able to come up with that idea!
I’m a “fun hacker”!
If you like creating games or apps for entertainment purposes, you’re probably a “fun hacker” by my reckoning. I used to work at a game company, and their hackathons were (of course) totally dominated by games of all varieties. There was one particularly memorable (for me) project in Bangkok where someone used Cloud Functions to progressively un-blur an image of either myself or Sheldon Cooper, and you had to guess which of us was in the picture. That day, I learned that I kinda-sorta look like Sheldon Cooper.
Get out there and hack!
To be honest, I used to dislike the idea of a hackathon because I always felt “dirty” about writing what feels like mostly terrible code to get something done quickly. I’ve always been a big fan of processes like Test Driven Development that yield high code quality, at the expense of some extra time up front. But my experiences with Firebase suggest there is a place for quick hacks alongside disciplined software engineering. And it can be fun and rewarding!
Just two weeks ago, we hosted our party at WWDC to celebrate app development with the iOS community. We were thrilled to meet many of you including tons of talented developers from Apple, Uber, Spotify, Tinder, and more. With over a
thousand RSVPs, it was amazing to see the excitement among the community!
Since we can't travel back in time, here are some highlights so you can relive
the night of fun.
The entrance
We love our customers - so what better way to show our appreciation then rolling
out the red carpet? We also made sure to have friendly hosts to greet you at the
door and security guards as rigorous as an IDS.
The experience
We noticed most of you felt right at home at Forager. It was great to see all of you mingle with each other and with us to and discuss
app development and all the WWDC announcements of the day. Whether we found you
at the stand up tables, or hanging out on the blue and yellow sofas: everyone
was having fun!
Thank you to all those who submitted creative
names for our cocktails and congrats to the winners! The Minty
Multithread and Nulltonic Expression were hits and
went great with the finger-licking good appetizers.
The fun
Many of you shared your passion projects with other developers
on the flat screens throughout the venue. And we couldn't keep ourselves from
grinning at some of the pics from the paparazzi style photo booth. See all the
photo booth moments here.
Over half of you played AppShip3000 - our flagship cooperative multiplayer game.
You either flexed your knowledge muscle, or learned a thing or two about
Firebase. And many of you also saw one of our engineers live-code an app. Was it
a hotdog? Or not? What do you think?
The swag
Since it's dub dub, we crafted custom designed iPhone protective cases for you
to take home (in case cocktails and holding-onto-phones don't mix). Stylish tees
included as usual.
Thank you to all those who joined us for the night - we were glad to share all
the laughter with you. Check out our full photo album. (photos
credit: Yvonne TNT)
Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.
We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:
Improve App Quality to Deliver Better User Experiences
Firebase Crash Reporting comes out of Beta and adds a new feature that helps you diagnose and reproduce app crashes.
Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.
Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.
Firebase Test Lab for Android supports more devices and introduces a free tier.
We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.
Illustration of Firebase Crash Reporting
Make Faster Data Driven Decisions with Firebase Analytics
Firebase Analytics now offers live conversion collection, a new integration with Google “Data Studio”, and real-time exporting to BigQuery.
We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:
DebugView for validation of your analytics instrumentation is currently offered in limited availability and will be made more broadly available later this year
We were happy to give you a sneak preview at the Firebase Dev Summit of a new feature we are now building, StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as it streams in.
To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. Also, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.
Build Better Games using Firebase
Firebase now has a Unity plugin!
Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.
Integrate Firebase Even Easier with Open-Sourced UI Library
FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.
Learn More via Udacity and Join the Firebase Community
We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.
Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.
Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!
We're excited to announce the full speaker list and agenda for the first ever
Firebase Dev Summit!
Find the latest schedule on our newly launched site here
featuring sessions such as How to Develop Rock Solid Apps with
Firebase, a Firebase Analytics deep dive, Develop Mobile Apps
without Infrastructure , and more!
The Firebase Dev Summit is on Monday, November 7th with a full day of talks,
codelabs and office hours. The Summit will end with an afterparty where you can
enjoy drum and bass and mix and mingle with event attendees and the Firebase
team.
Tickets are sold out, but you can sign
up for the waitlist to be notified if a spot becomes available. We will also
livestream the
entire event in case you want to join us online. Sign up to
receive an receive an email alert when sessions are about to start!
We want to hear from you! Join the conversation on Slack, G+ and Twitter.
We recently announced that the first Firebase Dev Summit will be held in Berlin on Nov 7th. A few spots for app developers are still available and we encourage you to register today!
In our experience there are a number of things required that make a great developer event- and it just happens we’ll have them all at the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin next month:
1. Announcements. Since our announcement at I/O, we’ve worked hard to add even more exciting features that will help you develop and grow your app. Be the first to hear about our new releases and to exclusively try them out.
2. Meet the Firebase team. Firebase founders, product managers, and engineers will be on hand to answer questions, hear how you're using Firebase and discuss how we can make it even better.
3. Content. The full speaker list and schedule will be released next week! Spoilers: sessions on growth hacking with Firebase, app quality, developing without infrastructure, trainings for new features (and more!) will be part of the full day agenda.
4. Cool swag. This is our first ever Firebase Dev Summit and we take it pretty seriously…
5. Travel grant. We believe a diversity of attributes, experiences, and perspectives are needed to build tools and apps that can change the world. So, we’ve partnered with the Women Techmakers team to offer travel grants to women in technology interested in attending. Apply here to join us in Berlin.
6. Network. The Firebase Dev Summit is for app developers like you. This will be a great chance to meet other folks that are working on similar challenges, have a drink together and dance to the sounds of Drum & Bass while chatting about Firebase. :)
Oh, did we mention that the event is free of charge? We hope you can make it - don’t forget to reserve your spot before we sell out.
Can’t make it? Sign up here if you’d like to receive updates on the livestream and tune in live on November 7th.
We’re excited to announce that the registration for the Firebase Dev Summit is opening today!
Six months ago, thousands of developers joined us at Google I/O in Mountain View, CA to hear about the expansion of Firebase to become a unified app platform that helps developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. We want to share these updates with you (and maybe even a few new ones!) at the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin, Germany. Registration is now open, but keep in mind that space will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis, so make sure to register today.
Our product managers and engineering team (including me!) will be there, and we’re excited to meet you in person and learn how we can make Firebase easier for you to develop extraordinary experiences for your users on iOS, Android, and the Web.
What is the Firebase Dev Summit?
The Firebase Dev Summit is full day event for app developers that will focus on how to use Firebase with your apps. The day will have a packed agenda with valuable sessions from Firebase and our partners, and is a great chance to meet developers from your local community.
But, the day isn’t just about us talking to to you -- we also want to see you get your hands dirty with Firebase. You’ll get a chance to put your new knowledge into practice with a hands-on workshop and codelabs that walk you through all the different features of Firebase. Firebase engineers will be on hand to help you get up and running, and answer any questions you may have.
We’re looking forward to meeting you in person. Danke!
