Firebase with Doug Stevenson

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service).

The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good backend for chat tools. And so they started a chat-as-a-service tool, for people who wanted to include chat in their applications. And that led them to the fundamental realization that chat is actually representative of a broader category of real-time synchronization problems. Firebase was eventually acquired by Google.

Doug Stevenson is a senior developer advocate with Google and the host of Meet Firebase, a YouTube talk show about Firebase. It was a pleasure to sit down for a conversation with him, especially because I recently started using Firebase in my own application as a backend for real-time chat.

 

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.