As a side-project Firebase user, I empathize with it being slowly consumed by GCP. I don’t have the time or inclination to learn GCP for a side project. I opted for Firebase because it had a great developer experience.
As time toes on and more and more Firebase features are redirected to GCP equivalents, the DX value prop is being drained out of the product and I’m left not even understanding my own infrastructure. I’m thankful the author pointed out Supabase, it seems like a great alternative.
[cloud functions for firebase manager] I understand that the decision to shuffle users to GCP for logs was controversial. It wasn’t decided, as some have said here, because some director had an OKR to fluff up; it was because our UX team couldn’t keep up with the sheer amount of innovation in GCP’s observability suite. Check out Daniel Lee’s talk next Tuesday on observability and cloud functions for firebase for some cool tricks. Did you know, for example, that you can jump into the trace for a log line in GCP? That you can create custom metrics with alerts? That you can filter by structured log segments?
I think a tutorial could smooth over the transition, but I think this decision was for the best. If you want a super simple logs reader for in-the-moment analysis, try the CLI command “firebase functions:logs”
I appreciate your reply and I believe every word you have said. Thank you for the hard work and thought you and your team have put into your products, and I'm sorry to hear if anyone is casting you as faceless corporate politicians reaching for meaningless goals. I know exactly how that feels.
To be frank with my feedback, I am a person who uses Firebase for a side project. I don't have the mental capacity to watch an ~hour talk for each piece of GCP infra I don't understand. I liked Firebase because I could understand it intuitively through its UX.
I'm sure the GCP features are very helpful and innovative and I'd get a great ROI from the talk if I worked on them for my full-time job. But some weeks, an hour is all I have. I'm an app developer and I would just like to deploy my app please, and have the rest fade into the background, or at least integrate with my existing workflows.
Thanks for all your hard work. I understand if "side project developers" is not the top of your funnel. But I hope you hear my feedback.
Ha there was a man named Steve in our industry who made a pretty good career out of making technology ‘usable by mere mortals’ who comes to mind right now.
What if 741 new features are introduced to Cloud Logging, will these be forced onto the Firebase user?
Oppression of choice is a real problem. Firebase must cherry pick the best of the new features and wrap it in their own UX in order to stay relevant.
Being booted into a completely new and unfamiliar UX with dozens of knobs and dials is a jarring experience.
It might not have been a managers OKR but it’s very obvious that in an effort not to lose the “whales” your casting the new too widely and potentially killing a lot of smaller fish.
As time toes on and more and more Firebase features are redirected to GCP equivalents, the DX value prop is being drained out of the product and I’m left not even understanding my own infrastructure. I’m thankful the author pointed out Supabase, it seems like a great alternative.