Welcome to #FirebaserFriday!

Join us for the monthly mini-profiles on Firebase team members, aka “Firebasers”, from all around the world! Learn about their backgrounds, how they got started with Firebase, what Firebase products they work on, their favorite ways to de-stress, advice, and more.

For our first feature, we’re happy to introduce you to a long standing member of the Firebase community. You may know his work from Firebase Release Notes, one of his talks at Google events, or used one of his many community responses from Stack Overflow. And now, we give you puf!

How did you get started with Firebase?

I was in the habit of answering questions on Stack Overflow to learn about interesting new technologies, when questions about Firebase started showing up. My answers got noticed, and that led to me becoming a member of the Firebase team at Google. And 7 years later, answering questions about Firebase on Stack Overflow is still one of my favorite things to do each day!

What are you working on right now?

I just gave a talk at Flutter Vikings about synchronizing game state in a Flutter app, and, as part of the Flutter Puzzle Hack, about adding Firebase to your Flutter app. I'm also working with the Flutter GDEs to get more/better Flutter answers on Stack Overflow. Between that, answering questions on Stack Overflow, and the monthly Firebase Release Notes video, I keep busy. :)

Do you have a nickname? How did you get it?

Not sure if it counts as a nickname, but I am known as puf. While I respond to both Frank and puf equally, I'm usually the only puf in the room. I got the nickname in my teens, as I was really tired of all the variations of my last name, and I've been known as “puf” to most people since then.

What are you reading right now?

I read a lot. I just finished The Lincoln Conspiracy and am halfway through Carve the Mark and The Brothers Karamazov.

Where can we find your work?

You can find me on Twitter here.

The journey of building and releasing an app can sometimes feel like scaling a mountain – both can be filled with hurdles and require a lot of hard work. At Firebase, our goal is to make this journey easier by providing you with tools and resources you need to build and grow apps users love.

That is why every year, we bring the community together at Firebase Summit to share exciting new product updates, answer your burning questions, and provide hands-on training so you can get the most out of our platform. This year won’t be any different, and we are excited to announce that Firebase Summit will be returning as a virtual event on November 10th, 2021 at 9:30am PST. We also have a few exciting activities leading up to Firebase Summit, so read on for what to expect.

Hands-on Learning Experiences

To help you get ready for Firebase Summit, and deepen your knowledge about our products and services, we’ll release a new set of learning pathways every week leading up to the main event. These learning pathways will consist of easy-to-follow codelabs, articles, interactive videos, and quizzes. After completing a pathway, you’ll also have the opportunity to earn a shiny new Google developer badge. The first weekly pathway will launch on October 13th, so check out the event website for more details.

Community Talks

One of the best ways to learn about Firebase is from other developers. On November 3rd, we’ll host community talks where you will get the opportunity to hear from Google Developer Experts on topics like how to build enterprise scale apps with Firebase, implement authorization models, and so much more. Mark your calendars and visit the event website where we’ll highlight these sessions.

Live Keynote, On-demand Technical Sessions, and More

The pathways and community talks lead up to Firebase Summit on November 10th, which will kick off with a jam-packed keynote at 9:30 am PST. Join us to learn how Firebase can help you accelerate app development, run your app with confidence, and scale your business with ease. After the keynote, you can ask questions in the chat and have them answered live by the Firebase team during #AskFirebase. We will also have new on-demand technical sessions on our latest announcements, and demos that you can view at your convenience.

We’ll be sharing more details about Firebase Summit 2021 in the coming weeks so stay tuned. In the meantime, register for the event, subscribe to the Firebase YouTube channel, and follow us on Twitter to join the conversation. #FirebaseSummit

A few months ago, we released Firestore for Games into open alpha. Thanks to all of your feedback, today, we're happy to announce that Cloud Firestore for Games is now publicly available in beta for C++ and Unity developers.

Firestore is a new performant and scalable serverless database option from Firebase for all your game development needs. It can help you add guilds to your latest mobile game, build a backend for your next big turn-based game, or add realtime chat. It’s also a key component of Firebase Extensions like Translate Text and Trigger Email, making it easier than ever to deploy pre-built complex workflows to your games.

What is Cloud Firestore?

Cloud Firestore is Google’s next generation cloud NoSQL database. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to scale for whatever workload you send its way. For the past two years it’s been generally available for the Web, iOS, and Android, and now it’s available for game developers as well.

Cloud Firestore exists alongside our existing Realtime Database. We’ll continue to support Realtime Database because it still works great for when you need to share data quickly with lots of players in near realtime. With Firestore you get more advanced queries on your data, 99.999% guaranteed uptime, and support for up to a million concurrent players -- all whilst remaining fast enough for many of your gaming backend needs. If you need more help deciding which database is right for you, check out this helpful guide.

Wasn’t Cloud Firestore already available?

Even though Firestore has been generally available for some time, the existing SDKs were built with the workflows and tools favored by app and web developers. Although game developers working in languages like JavaScript, Kotlin, and Swift would have no problem adopting the existing development kits, you would’ve had to jump through hoops to access them from Unity or C++. However, here at Firebase and Google, we want to make it easy for game developers to build, release, and operate games. So, we've built SDKs that bring game developers the same levels of convenience that app developers enjoy.

What’s changed since Alpha?

The Beta tag means that we believe that the Firestore SDKs for Unity and C++ are now stable enough that game developers can confidently use them in shipping games. Bugs and small API tweaks may crop up here and there as more developers pick it up, but Firestore is now a viable option when starting new game projects.

A big improvement that alpha testers might notice is that the new libraries have full feature parity with the platform specific Firestore SDKs. This includes many features alpha testers have asked for, such as OnSnapshotsInSync and support for the Blob data type. All transforms (like incrementing values) and query types (like "array-contains-any") are now implemented as well. We’ve also worked to make Firestore more consistent with the other Unity Firebase SDKs by ensuring that events fire on the main thread and adding more consistency to error reporting.

Since we’ve seen that many game developers tend to target multiple platforms with a single codebase, we’ve ensured that every feature in Firestore SDK C++ SDK works identically on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. This means that you can develop your game logic on a desktop computer with access to the entire Firestore for games feature set, and remain confident that it will continue to function on your target device. We've also fully opened sourced the C++ SDK so you can easily build, debug, and port your code to wherever you need.

How do I get it?

This Firestore beta, like the alpha, ships with the standard Firebase C++ and Unity SDKs. To use it, simply ensure you’re using the latest Firebase SDK either by downloading the C++ zip or the Unity zip. Remember, if you come across any bugs, report them to us through our support channel or on the C++ or Unity issue pages.

It’s been a year since we all came together in Madrid, Spain for Firebase Summit 2019, shared announcements and updates, and listened to your product feedback. Since then the world as we know it has changed, but here at Firebase our mission to help developers succeed by making it easy to build and operate mobile and web apps remains the same.

We’ve been working hard to build tools to help you accelerate app development, gain actionable insights and scale with ease. We’re looking forward to sharing these updates with you at this year’s virtual Firebase Summit, happening 27-28 October at 9:30AM PST each day. All you have to do is prop up your mobile device or laptop, head over to firebase.google.com/summit, and tune in from wherever you’d like.

While we will miss connecting with you in person, we are excited that even more developers can join us this year.

Here’s what to expect during the two days:

Join us 27 October at 9:30 am PST for the opening keynote to learn how Firebase can help you build and operate your apps. After the keynote, you can ask questions in the chat and have them answered live by the Firebase team during #AskFirebase.

Stay tuned for 11 technical sessions on topics like monitoring your latest release, increasing user engagement, optimizing your app revenue, and more. These sessions will be live streamed over the two days so you can watch and chat with other developers and the Firebase team, or you can watch them on-demand at your convenience.

For a more hands-on learning experience, watch us live code an app from scratch using Flutter and Firebase. You can also try one of our new demos, codelabs with walkthrough videos and multi-step tracks to learn about popular topics such as how to build a web app using Firebase.

We will be releasing more details about Firebase Summit in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sign up for updates on our event page, subscribe to the Firebase YouTube channel, and follow us on Twitter to join the conversation.

Here at Firebase we are extremely proud of our avid developer community. We love interacting with so many of you at different events throughout the year. Our event plans have changed this year, but one thing that hasn’t changed is our commitment to you and all of the great stuff you build. So we’re trying something new to virtually bring everyone together, and are excited to introduce Firebase Live!

Firebase Live is a new 5-part weekly web series for developers consisting of talks, tips, and technical tutorials to help you increase productivity and collaboration among your team. Every Tuesday at 9:30am PST from June 23 through July 21, we’ll host a new video highlighting best practices and product updates. Everyone can watch the new video together and chat with members of the Firebase team and other developers along the way. After each video, Firebase experts will answer all your burning questions live. The topics include:

• 6/23: Unit testing Security Rules with the new Firebase Emulator Suite
• 6/30: The Local Firebase Emulator UI in 15 minutes
• 7/07: Sign in with Apple using Firebase Authentication
• 7/14: Developer’s Guide to Google Analytics
• 7/21: Getting started with Google Analytics and Firebase in Unity

We will also be launching a new demo and codelabs with walkthrough videos so you can learn at your own pace and build your skills.

Excited about this weekly web series? Check out our event page and follow us on Twitter to join the conversation.

We may not be able to meet in person right now, but we’re still here to help you build amazing things.